The evolution of the typographer described in four manuals:

This was written for Baseline but in that version I had Vincent Steer's Printing Design and Layout, published in 1934, as the fourth manual. It was Hans Dieter Reichert, Baseline's editor, who suggested Tschichold's Die Neue Typographie would be a better choice. Sadly, Baseline folded shortly after and following more revisions I offered it to Sebastian Carter, editor of Parenthesis who accepted it.

Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 1683/4 
John Smith, The Printer’s Grammar, 1755 
Oscar H Harpel, Harpel’s Typograph, 1870 
Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie, 1928

Use of the term ‘typographer’ has an ambivalent history. Often superfluous and somewhat vague, it was used to encapsulate ‘the trade and mystery’ of the printer.1 This description was written in 1642 by Sir Thomas Browne, and not intended to be flattering. In fact, he was complaining about a glut of books whose only purpose, he cynically suggested, was to serve the egos of scholars and the pockets of typographers: ‘begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of scholars and to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers’. 

Every town had a master weaver, stone mason, blacksmith etc, all of whom were held in high esteem for their skills in making products essential to the community. The master printer was different. Firstly the process of printing was kept hidden from view, hence its ‘mystery’, and second, the books he produced were expensive – roughly three times the weekly wage of a skilled worker – and exclusive; 80% of the population were illiterate.2 

All apprentices, but especially print apprentices, had a reputation for excessive alcoholic drinking and rowdiness although it seems likely they were no better or worse than other apprentices at the time or since. Their behaviour probably attracted special attention because everyone knew they had come from ‘respectable’ families and had the privilege of a good education. More generally, therefore, printing had the reputation of being a ‘genteel’ trade – a perception encouraged by the print fraternity which needed to recruit from the educated classes. The term ‘typographer’ was helpful because it encompassed this scholarly activity with the subsequent craft activities associated with the printing process. 

What it meant to be a typographer was explained by Joseph Moxon in what was the first manual for printers; the second volume of a series titled Mechanick Exercises: or the Doctrine of Handy-works published in 1683/4: ‘By a typographer I do not mean a printer as he is vulgarly accounted [but instead] I mean such a one, who by his own judgment, from solid reasoning within himself, can either perform, or direct others to perform from the beginning to the end, all the handyworks and physical operations relating to typographie’. 

Moxon alludes to a design process and describes the ‘typographer’ as being the person with overall responsibility for the endeavours of the press, comparing his role to that of an architect; ‘I find that a typographer ought to be qualified with all the sciences that become an architect [...] For my own part, I weighed it well in my thoughts, and find all the accomplishments and some more of an architect necessary in a typographer...’ and goes on to say that the status of the typographer was at least as important as the author, describing the former as ‘a collaborator’ in the construction and transmission of meaning within the printed text. This is a remarkable statement and one at odds with the role of typography proffered as printing orthodoxy for the next two hundred years, in which the typographer is given a subservient role to the author. 

Printer’s manuals were always more than merely a handbook for apprentices to study, they were also a self-serving, even self-aggrandizing mediation of print through print. The typography discussed was earnest book typography. The reason jobbing work – printed matter other than books – was given such short shrift or simply ignored, was because it appeared impossible to equate craftsmanship with something that had no innate value in its own right. Less clear is why the printer’s design practice, described by Moxon as ‘solid reasoning within himself’, was not considered worthy of further explanation. For example, did printer’s ever draw a layout – even a thumb-nail sketch? 

Probably not. Within the confines of the printing shop, design was a process more likely achieved using the raw typographic materials of print with which the compositor lived, ate and drank twelve to fourteen hours every working day. So intuitive was the handling of type, leads and furniture that if a word or line proved too long, short, bold, or light it would be replaced with an alternative without the need for further trial or reflection. Such action, as natural as breathing, took seconds to achieve, the printed outcome certain in the compositor’s mind. In this way, typography was designed in the stick and at the stone with the resultant printed proof given to the client for approval. Pencil and paper were redundant. 

The Industrial Revolution enabled larger printing companies to start mechanising during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the effect was that maintaining the aim that apprentices learnt every aspect of the printer’s work became impractical. Taking advantage of economies of scale led to the process being broken into departments, each becoming increasingly autonomous by the creation of its own distinct skill-sets. These changes disrupted the once clear path from apprentice to journeyman to master, and with that, the authority of the printer’s guild3 – whose purpose was to regulate standards of service, workshop equipment and training – was diminished. 

In contrast, a young apprentice attached to a jobbing printer would generally be one of a small cohesive group, often no more than two or three, all of whom needed to be competent at all tasks required in order to see a job through to print. As a result, a conscientious youngster could, in a relatively short time, gain a thorough understanding of every aspect of his trade. In this way, the jobbing printer remained closer to what Moxon had defined as ‘a typographer’ than the lauded book printer. However, this is not how officers of the printer’s guild saw the situation. The nature of jobbing work, in particular its diverse range of purposes and bespoke solutions, meant that standard ‘rules of good taste and judgment’ were impossible to apply. In addition, some job printing businesses were being set up with finance from a ‘proprietor’ rather than a master printer. The temptation to purchase equipment second-hand would be hard to resist,4 with the result that even the most diligent of printers would struggle to obtain a good impression from worn type or a defective press. Technical standards within jobbing printers were certainly variable and the worst offenders were a source of intense irritation to the local offices of the Printer’s Guild which found its authority undermined by an increasingly entrepreneurial and recalcitrant trade. 

It is tempting to imagine that working in a jobbing design and print shop might be less rule-bound than in a larger book printing establishment. This being the case, an apprentice in a jobbing print shop capable of bringing initiative or even creative flair to the process would be a prime asset and encouraged to put such abilities to good use. In contrast, there were fewer opportunities to demonstrate any sense of differentiation in a book printing company, or certainly not before attaining a senior position. 

Nevertheless, the reality, more likely, was far from congenial for a young apprentice; barely in his teens, immaturity and lack of guile would make him an easy target – bear-baiting, after all, was still popular entertainment in England! But at least within the confines of a small jobbing print works it was in everyone’s interest to help a youngster gain sufficient knowledge and confidence to be useful as quickly as possible. 

By the time John Smith wrote The Printer’s Grammar in 1755, some ninety years after Moxon, the typographer had been eclipsed by the author to the extent that typography was now conceived as a transparent manifestation of the author’s intent. No major changes in the printing process had occurred, workers proceeded, for the most part, as they had in Moxon’s time, so what had caused the removal of the typographer from the consequences of his work? 

Firstly, the separation of printing from publishing. Printers had initially printed, published, and sold their own books, and many would have used the international book trade routes established before Gutenberg by merchants buying and selling hand-written manuscripts. The well-traveled merchant, purchasing books at a discount from printers in bulk and selling them to bookshop owners, was in a perfect position to judge which books were commercially viable, and some, recognising an opportunity, began to commission books from printers. In this way, the printer slowly relinquished the entrepreneurial burden and financial risk of publishing to concentrate on providing a print-to-order service. 

Secondly, the effects of this change and the resultant market-driven nature of publishing can be seen in both the content and style of John Smith’s manual. With loss of ownership comes (potentially) loss of accountability. Smith’s text does not describe a scene of human endeavour; intuition, acumen and intelligence, but instead, a system of typographical designation and workplace regulation which, if implemented, Smith argues, will result in a ‘proper’ – meaning uniform and standardized – ‘design’. His opening sentence sets the tone: ‘Conformable to the General method which is observed in Grammars, we begin this also with the Principles thereof, viz. letters; with this difference, that instead of applying their signification, as in others, to the art of speaking and writing some particular language, we shall consider them as the chief Printing-Materials; and in the course of this Chapter treat of their Contexture, Superficial shape, and such Properties as come under the cognizance of Printers, Booksellers, and others who have a judgement of Printing’.5 

Above all else, Smith’s goal is governance – a manageable process; predictable and, therefore, the effectively transparent application of type.6 If this is achieved, Smith suggests, there is no need for a ‘typographer’ as such. This is highlighted in the charts and tables that intersperse his text (rather than Moxon’s illustrations of men using tools) accrediting formula over any judgment resulting from hand and eye. It is no surprise that Smith ignored the existence of the jobbing printer. How could such regulation be applied to a process that was so disparate in purpose and required to attract attention? 

The extent to which Smith’s argument for standardisation reflected the printing fraternity’s intent was demonstrated by their combative response to John Baskerville’s first book, Virgil, published in 1757, two years after the appearance of Grammar. Baskerville’s lack of regard for the status quo caused him to be labeled an amateur and his methods eccentric. He was certainly an amateur in the sense that he had never worked in a printer’s premises let alone undergone the statutory seven-year apprenticeship. He was also the first great English independent typographer. 

Baskerville was certainly not, as Moxon put it, ‘a printer as he is vulgarly accounted’. Nor was John Bell, some thirty years later, a remarkably successful publisher and bookseller who had also been a printer and typefounder (in collaboration with punchcutter Richard Austin). Bell was, like Baskerville, an independent typographer and responsible for establishing what he was the first to call ‘fine printing’. That such a term should be coined to differentiate ‘good’ printing from that provided by the commercial printer was the strongest possible condemnation of a standard of work Smith called, ‘cognizance of Printers, Booksellers, and others who have a judgment of Printing’. Baskerville and Bell saw it as the sole responsibility of the typographer – not ‘others’ – to be the judge of the printed work. 

The term ‘fine print’ may have become the anathema of the commercial printer, but few seemed interested in attempting to measure up to it. (The Chiswick Press was a notable exception.) The reasons for this are obvious; despite, or perhaps because of, the many improvements to printing, type design, and manufacturing Baskerville introduced, he did not profit from them. His standards of production meant that he was unable to compete with commercial printers for the work of booksellers/publishers who complained that his prices were two or three times more than any other printer. 

However, the fortunes of his admirers on the Continent proved that Baskerville’s fate had not been inevitable. Despite being equally pedantic in their methods7 and innovative in their design, printers such as Bodoni (Italy) Didot (France) and Ibarra (Spain) demonstrated that high typographic standards, when combined with economies of scale, could be profitable. 

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the influence of Didot and Bodoni typefaces were dominant in all spheres of typography and proved to be the intermediate step in the creation of ‘fat face’, a typeface designed expressly for jobbing design and print. It was a display or ‘fancy’ face: characterful and brash. As Nicolette Gray put it: ‘The new market, that of advertising printing, had been recognised.’8 

Fat face, introduced by Robert Horne in 1803, was possibly the first time that historical precedence, or standard typographic principles, had so little influence on the design of a typeface. For aficionados of transparent typography, the results were ‘a folly of preposterous disproportions’.9 Such comments only added fuel to typefoundry furnaces causing a deluge of increasingly extravagant display typefaces, first in England and then in America led by MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan Co. of Philadelphia. No longer dependent on Britain and Europe for inspiration American printers were empowered to seek something distinctive. 

The wave of confidence sweeping the American printing industry was epitomized by Oscar H Harpel, master jobbing printer and owner of The Harpel Mercantile Job Rooms in Cincinnati who wrote, designed, printed and published Harpel’s Typograph or Book of Specimens in 1870, hugely admired and influential at the time, 10 it is the first manual specifically for the jobbing printer, or as Harpel described him on the title page, ‘typographic designer and printer’. 

Harpel’s description of the typographer is closer in spirit to Moxon’s than any of the manuals that appeared in the 186 years that separate them. Typographers, Harpel insisted, must use their own judgment rather than standard formulae: ‘Rules have not yet been discovered [...] that will teach the producing of original ideas, and gracefully avoiding perceptible sameness in arranging the multitude of subjects that fall into the [typographer’s] hands’. 

On ‘composition’ Harpel is remarkably close to Moxon: ‘Changes of words and phrases, when they do not mar the original sense also contribute at times to render a device more complete. [...] It not infrequently happens that patrons expressly desire and expect [advice] from the intelligent printer, and he is accorded reasonable latitude to shape his ideas without arbitrary adherence to copy if the attractiveness of the printed work can be enhanced.’ Or as Moxon put it, the typographer is a ‘collaborator’, working alongside the author in the construction and transmission of meaning within the printed text. For both, printing had an intellectual purpose as well as an aesthetic and duplicative one. 

Harpel was lauded as a revolutionary voice in his time. That he is not lauded today is due in large part to the fact that he did not follow his own advice: ‘Excessive embellishment often utterly destroys the attractiveness it is meant to increase’. Yet on the title page of Typograph, Harpel used six colours, one of which is gold, and eleven typefaces, some embellished beyond the point of readability. But the second reason is that his notion of design was undoubtedly naive – not surprising given the time, place, and limitations of his traditional training – so he could not describe what the process entailed and even struggled to explain what its true purpose was – beyond providing ‘distinction’ from a rival product or service. Nevertheless, Harpel’s attempt to shake up the printing fraternity; daring to question long-standing working methods and practices; and his insistence that compositors must no longer be constrained by historic precedent, gave the jobbing printer a couple of decades in which to enjoy the rarefied (if self-annointed) status of ‘artistic printer’.11 

The much improved technical standards achieved within the artistic printing movement was greatly aided by the manufacture of new, compact, one-man, platen hand presses (significantly, also called ‘jobbing presses’). They were simpler, efficient and enabled accurate registration. But their relative ease of use also helped erode the printers’ monopoly of print. Harpel’s Typograph was addressed to ‘Master Printers, Amateurs, Apprentices, and Others’, suggesting that Harpel (who praised such presses) recognised this. Printing itself had also ceased to be the only way that writing could be mechanically produced or reproduced. Technological innovations – typewriters in particular – offered writers the personal means of authorial expression with standardized letterforms and spacing.12 

Print and printer remained authoritative, but before the end of the 19th century there was a sense that the printing press and its environs were no longer sacrosanct. A point made with great bravado by William Morris with the setting up of his Kelmscott Press. Defiant in his archaism, Morris’ books were admired for their weighty hand-made presence but also for their cavalier display of affectations and idiosyncrasies. The potential of typography to be a personal means of expression was both alluring and provocative, and would be important in the development of the ‘typographer’ as an attractive, independent profession. In the USA some typographic designers (Goudy, for example, and for shorter periods Bradley and Dwiggins) followed Morris’ example and became printers as well as designers. In Britain and Europe typographic designers were learning to work in close but separate proximity to printers. 

In 1923, the first edition of The Fleuron: A Journal of Typography, was published in London, edited by Oliver Simon, closely assisted by Stanley Morison. They shared an office from which both worked as typographic designers and consultants on behalf of printers; Simon with the Curwen Press (who printed the first four issues of The Fleuron) and Morison, until recently with the Cloister Press. They also shared an admiration of the work of Bruce Rogers who had a similar working relationship with the printing company Houghton Mifflin in Massachusetts. In 1917 Rogers was invited by Cambridge University Press to act as their ‘printing adviser’. This new, if temporary, post set an important precedent, especially one established by such an august British institution. That there were aspects of printing and book production that were beyond the grasp of the printer was a exceptional admission.13 Morris had been an outsider, and so too were Simon, Morison and Rogers; confident, knowledgeable, and determinedly coming to typography without having undergone the statuary printer’s apprenticeship. 

In Leipzig, 1923 was the year that Jan Tschichold began practicing what he described, erroneously, as ‘the previously unknown profession of typographic designer’ with the printing company Fischer & Wittig.14 He had received his typographic training at the Akademie für Künste und Buchgewerbe (Academy of Art and the Book Trade). Whilst this was clearly not the training that a print apprentice would receive it was considerably more specific than the general Arts and Crafts education received in most schools of art. In the summer of that year Tschichold went to Weimar to see the Bauhaus exhibition of student work and his already growing interest in the social-artistic ideas of the Russian Constructivists was ignited, and for the rest of the decade he became a willing and eloquent propagandist for the new movement. 

At the height of these missionary efforts, the German Printing Trade Union offered Tschichold a guest editorship of their trade journal Typographische Mitteilungen (October 1925). That a print union was willing to provide a platform for a designer – and one with such radical ideas – says a great deal about the enlightened state and confidence of the German printing industry. It also reflects positively on the level of commitment to typographic design and communication theory within Germany’s print education system. 

Despite, or perhaps even because of, the furor created by the views expressed in Typographische Mitteilungen, the educational division of the German Printing Trade Union then agreed to publish Tschichold’s Die Neue Typographie in 1928. This was a typographic design manual which firmly places typographic practice in the context of literary and visual avant-garde culture rather than a history of print. For example, Tschichold includes the work of, Cezanne, Kandinski, Rodchenko, and others before tracing a path from the textual arrangements of Stéphane Mallmarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘calligrammes’. These, he argues, paved the way for less conventional textual arrangements – ‘liberating’ the typographer from the traditional book form and illustrated with work by the Futurists, Dadaists and De Stijl. 

No concession is made to the printer’s expectations of what a printer’s manual might contain nor any possible assumptions about the nature of their day-to-day occupation, despite his publisher being the print trade union. Tschichold states in the introduction that the purpose of his manual is ‘to stimulate [...] and make [the printer] aware of himself and the true nature of his work’ (page 7). Importantly, since 1926, Tschichold had been teaching typographic design at the Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdruker (an advanced level college for German printers) whose Director was Paul Renner, so Tschichold knew his audience well.15 However, his correspondence with, for example, Piet Zwart and El Lissitzky, makes it clear that Tschichold also had a broader readership in mind.16 

Die Neue Typographie has a modest appearance; small quarto format, flexible boards covered in fine black cloth with a silver title printed on the spine only. The content is organised into two parts of almost equal length; first a historical and theoretical discussion concerning the ‘Growth and Nature of the New Typography’; the second, ‘Principal Typographic Categories’, is divided into nineteen subsections each dealing with a common ‘jobbing’ design subject, for example; ‘the typographic symbol’, ‘the business letterhead’, ‘advertising matter’ etc. Magazine design and ‘new book design’ are also included. All topics are supported by reproductions of graphic work which also include erroneous examples which Tschichold accompanies with a careful and reasoned critique. 

There is ample evidence of Tschichold’s knowledge and fascination for the craftsmanship required of the printer, but Die Neue Typographie resolutely focuses on design. Its fundamental theme is that design must develop ‘visible form out of the function of the text’ (page 66). Tschichold uses the term ‘decoration’ not only to describe material extraneous to function but, crucially, also to describe any ‘solution’ in which the appearance of typographic material is the result of the designer or compositor imposing a predetermined but erroneous concept. The caption to one of the flawed examples states, ‘The compositor has the idea of a prefabricated foreign shape and forces the words into it. But typographic form must be organic, it must evolve from the nature of the text’ (page 83) and, on the following page: ‘Wrong! It looks functional but when examined more closely we find it is superficial and does not express the text...’ 

Tschichold’s view of the Oscar Harpel period and the ‘artistic printers’ movement is predictable; it was ‘...a period of increasing decline which eventually, in the eighties and nineties of the last century, became quite unbearable.’ For Harpel the typographic designer’s responsibility was simple; ‘...avoiding perceptible sameness’ (this being a time when jobbing printers were attempting to distinguish themselves from the traditional or ‘transparent’ design of book typography). Tschichold, taking a surprisingly charitable view, suggests that the reasons for their generous use of superfluous material was due to ‘..the beginnings of the machine age [...] The tremendous power of these inventions gave contemporaries new opportunities whose possibilities were not grasped as quickly as they occurred or perhaps were not recognised at all’ (page 21). Similar comments were made in the wake of digital technology.17 

Die Neue Typographie did not arrive ‘out of the blue’ as had Harpel’s Typograph. Its gestation had been around five years during which time a series of articles and publications by others concerning the movement had occurred. Indeed, Moholy Nagy had written an article for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition catalogue also titled ‘Die Neue Typographie’, so by 1928 ‘New Typography’ as a concept already had considerable momentum. But typography as it was taught and practiced at the Bauhaus never strayed far beyond the necessary showmanship of posters, book covers and exhibition invitations. In contrast, Tschichold’s capacity as a professional typographer, his deep understanding and appreciation of the expertise within the printing trade (to say nothing of his experience teaching at a school for printers) meant that he was by far the best and certainly most eloquent practitioner to explain the origins and purpose, theory and practice, of New Typography to a broader audience.18 

In Die Neue Typographie Tschichold insisted the typographer take an integral role alongside the fast-evolving progress of other communication media such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and film. He also placed the typographer beside the engineer and scientist whilst aligning the cultural value of the typographer’s work with that of the artist, poet, author, and film director. As an influential, independent participant in the maelstrom of a fast-changing technological world of communications; the typographer had arrived.19