Capitol Offense Simon Garfield

Lower and upper case letters Positions of loose metal of wooden letters laid in front of compositors hand Lower case were on lower level Upper case above them

Type and type etiquette Font for a book cover (Pride and Prejudice), chose a font like Didot. Classy fine and stronger lines in italics, which would draw in audience who like to read classics. But a different audience, different font, less fusty, but still have the French pedigree. The title of the book should draw you in.

Type has genders Tall, solid, spaced age or heavy bold jagged fonts are mostly male. Whimsical curly fonts = female.

Gutenburg Born in Mainz, son of wealthy merchant. 1440’s borrow money to make ink and printing equipment Cast reusable letters use for printing for the next 500 hundred years Carving a letter in reverse on a steel rod, hammered in soft metal, indented matrix. Hot metal pour into a ladle and harden into letter. Print into book, broken down and use again

Cont. New oil based ink Book marketing Peter Schoeffer joined Gutenberg, played a role in punchcutting but was forgotten

First text by Gutenberg and Schoeffers Handwritten scripts, people were used to it Textura: famous Bible text; other text Bastarda Stored in British Library in London

Fonts Referred to as founts, 1970s Fonts done by hand, it was a complete set of letters, a certain size and style. A, b, c in upper and lower case letters Derived from “fund” amount of type Nowadays refers to particular typeface

Serifs and sans serif fonts Difference at tips of the letters, ground the letter on a page, looks traditional, square, honest and carved Sans serif, less formal more contemporary Durable, monumental, made more modern by Europeans

Type classifications Vox ; 1950s Bracket, unbracketed and wedge fall into different category

Everything else about fonts Body, beard, shoulder, face, ligature Grotesque face; thickness of letter strokes Neo-grotesque; uniform, less square look Point size, 72pts in an inch.

Gills San Made by Eric Gill; ceaseless sexual experimentation (with dogs) Began in mid 1920’s, in notebooks 1 st Penguin book jackets, ideal for catelogues and academia Modest, didn’t think himself as a typeface man Died when his font was at the highest point