INDUSTRY NEWS: McSweeny’s Takes on Type

Timothy McSweeny’s Internet Tendency has been posting some informative and hilarious articles online about font and typography. McSweeny’s is an independent publishing house based in San Fransisco and founded by American author David Eggers. Eggers is best known for his semi-autobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius published in the early 90s about his life at 21 raising his young brother after both parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. Eggers book was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and launched him into fame as the J.D. Salinger of Gen X. Eggers did not sit on his laurels. Rather he began Timothy McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern as literary journal, founded a publishing house, opened a comic book store, taught creative writing and continued to write, edit and create.Martin McClellan is a columnist for McSweeny’s and writes an increasingly interesting column called “Letters From the Hell Box” about typographer

When he was a child, Martin McClellan would sneak out into the garage where his father kept a hobby print shop. He’d spin the flywheel on the 19th century Golding Pearl press, pumping his leg on the treadle (cast iron in the shape of an ornate capital G) to achieve a great momentum. He’d jump on the treadle and ride it up and down until the energy dissipated and the ride slowed to a stop. To this day looking at great typography gives him an equivalent thrill. He’s awkwardly utopian about design. He lives in Seattle. (McSweeny’s preamble to “Letters From the Hell Box”).

The column can be academic, but always fascinating and infused with humour. For example, McClelland, in his entry entitled “Gutunberg and How Typography is Like Music“, describes the appeal of typography thusly: “Typography has a visceral and direct effect on everybody who reads. It can inhibit or enhance the feel of reading without being consciously noticeable. It does so by combining specific visuals that echo cultural memories, which are hopefully servile to the words they spell. Not unlike your favorite food tasting better on fine china then on paper plates, the choice of typeface can radically impact meaning while hopefully going consciously unnoticed. Try to exhort that indefinable magic in words, and you may as well be doing that over-quoted dance about architecture.”

 

McClelland describes the development of Blackletter font (seen here) by Gutenberg and how he chose this particular script to use in the presses to copy bibles. “Gothic” is the description. Where else have you seen it? You got it! Death Metal albums and Nazi films. Why would Gutenberg choose this font for the first lead presses in the world? McClelland surmises for the same reasons Death Metal bands and the Nazis did — “Because the letters evoke mood and time. They have a shape and life of their own outside of legibility.”

 

In McClelland’s entry entitled “Caslon, Baskerville and Franklin: Revolutionary Types”, he explores the origins of the three fonts and the largely eccentric men behind them.The punch-cutting and engraving Brit William Caslon, whose font was used on both original copies of the American Declaration of Independence (“Think about it: the first two printed copies of the Declaration of Independence were printed using type from a British designer. Doesn’t that make the ideas just slightly more subversive?” asks McClellan). The atheist and housemaid marrying Brit John Baskerville(and friend of American Benjamin Franklin) who, McClellan tells, “supposedly was the namesake for the titular character in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (in which, ironically, Holmes visits a hotel on Craven street near Franklin’s house.” And Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s founding fathers, prominent abolitionist, revolutionary and, last but not least, printer.

 

In “Tschichold, Nazis and Allen Lane: The Modernist Politics of Type”McClellan also writes of the trials and tribulations of German author Jan Tschichold, who’s book The New Typography created a strict system of type, lay-out and printing that insisted on order and sans serif types. Tschichold’s ideas about typography so offended the Nazi Party (whose dedication to Blackletter Fraktur as a “German” type) that he was arrested for “Cultural Bolshevism.”

Tschichold who survived the war by fleeing to Switzerland with his family, later became the designer at Penguin Books who brought the publishing house up to the stylistic standard to match its authors. What happened to Blackletter Fraktur? “Eventually,” writes McClellan, ‘the Nazis had a break with their beloved Fraktur. In 1941 Martin Borman, on behalf of Hitler, banned it under the mistaken paranoia that it was of Jewish origin. The letterhead on which the decree was typed was printed in Fraktur.”