12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely, Lovely Letters, May 12, 2010
This review is from: Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1 (Hardcover)
Let us consider the letter A. We must take the simple, three-lined capital A, because the lowercase a is not only complicated by curvy lines but it also comes in two distinct popular forms, one with a straight line at the right of the loop and one in which the line curves over the loop like an umbrella. So, I say, consider the A. Three straight lines, two leaning together up to a point, and one horizontal connecting their midsections. This is the Platonic A, the essence, and you'd know it anywhere. But if you start looking at the huge number of examples of A (and every other letter) in _Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Volume I, 1628-1900_ (Taschen), you may get the idea that that exemplar A can't really stand for much because there are too many variables. There are some letters A that have no straight lines (or are made up of flowers, or cartoons of heads), there are plenty that have no pointy top, there are lots that have more than three lines to them (it would take 20th century fonts to produce letters A with less than three lines), and so on. The book is edited by Cees W. de Jong, and it features examples of metal type specimens from the collection of the late Jan Tholenaar. Both these authors have written essays to provide a little context, but it is very little, compared to the 250 pages of print specimens, handsomely laid out in a big format on rich paper, between covers of canvas with the title and design stamped into it. This is a handsome object throughout.
Despite the subtitle, _Type_ is not really a history of type. It's bulk consists of beautifully reproduced pages of print catalogues from the specimen books Jan Tholenaar used to collect, and he concentrated on ones from the Victorian age. You know how Victorian décor for houses involved cramming lots of things into a room, things that had sometimes outrageous layers of decorative detail; it is fun to see that the same sort of exuberance is all over the pages here. After all, these are really only pages of catalogues, specialist catalogues for printers representing the narrowest of niche marketing, but they are astonishingly full of invention and brash showing-off. Such displays befit the period, and naturally the often anonymous artists who designed the decorative letters and flourishes shown here wanted to push limits. Besides letters, there are vignettes, a word which I know to mean "a little picture" or "a small description," but which before such meanings designated for the world of printers an ornamental design used to separate chapters or other divisions in a book, or a picture on the page unenclosed in a border. (The authors do not refer to "dingbats", which was a term of derision before printers began using it to mean a bit of ornamental type.)
The majority of letters here are display types, meant not for the ease of reading which Boldoni and Baskerville had in mind, but for amusement and show. Many would have been at home in circus posters, for instance. There are "black letter" faces that were used for things like newspaper mastheads, and even black letters that seem to be three dimensional. There are many experiments with three dimensions, with letters seemingly viewed from above, below, or to the side, sticking out from the page, or sticking into the page, or on long banners with one wave for each letter. There are calligraphic letters (and plenty of curlicue vignettes), and stencil forms, and letters that look as if they came from illuminated manuscripts, and many letters made of flowers. Some letters are populated by cupids, and some are held up by caryatids. There are letters of stripes vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, there is hatchwork, there are letters that seem to be puzzles that you have to work hard to understand. Sometimes full advertisements are reproduced, but often the letters are set in random words on a page. There are borders made out of flowers or abstract flourishes, or ones that look like bits of architecture, machinery, or draperies. There are pages of vignettes devoted to horses, to jesters, to clothing, to hands pointing left and to hands pointing right. Purchasers of this book might miss one of its most attractive assets. Sealed into the back cover is a "key card" with a password that will allow you to go to Taschen's website, where are archived over a thousand high-resolution scans of specimens in the book, and they are "downloadable for unrestricted use." The pages, and the website, ought to be particularly appreciated by those who work in printing and design, but are intoxicating even for those of us who just like seeing fancy letters beautifully presented.
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13 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
dreaming back to the past of typography, September 8, 2009
This review is from: Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1 (Hardcover)
Jan Tholenaar got for many years in the ban of the beuatiful typespecimenbooks particularely of the 19th century. He collected an unbelievable number of these books and know you can believe it after having seen a view in a number of items of his collection. I had the pleasure to meet him when he was in the middle of the creation of the visual history of typefaces and he enthousastically explained me how typesetters sometimes worked more than a month on one page! Recomended to everybody that loves old typography.
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