Hidden Impressions

At the Bow & Arrow Press in the basement of Adams House, the obsolete art of the letterpress thrives. Originally Gutenberg’s invention, the letterpress works by rolling a piece of paper over a raised surface that has an inked negative of the desired text. The Bow & Arrow’s lair is loaded with personal history: the space exhibits artwork from alums long gone, cases of type labeled “Our Faith” that were donated by a monastery, and a pair of KISS figurines that have long resided at the press.

“What people really like in a letterpress nowadays is the emboss, because that shows there was physical type hitting the paper,” says Ted Ollier, the non-resident tutor and conceptual artist who runs the press. “If you were printing invoices back in 1932, the last thing you would want is an emboss on your print. Today, the deeper the emboss, the better.” The difference of a few millimeters in typeface can convey a world of meaning, an engagement with the material that cannot be created by pressing “command P” and waiting for your inkjet to print paper. While a wide range of fonts has become accessible to the computer-literate public, a higher level of practical and aesthetic knowledge continues to rest in the minds of a small circle of connoisseurs.

THE FONT FAD

“What you know today is very new: digital typography,” says Elizabeth Resnick, a Professor of graphic design at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Thanks to the advent of the personal computer, our modern relationship with fonts is a novel one. Every time we send an email or create a document, a circumscribed array of fonts presents themselves. “Working on the PC really came into play in the very early 80s … For students today, born into an age of personal computers, it was here when you arrived,” she says.

As such, the average person has an understanding of fonts like never before. Evidence of the new cultural relevance of font abounds. The independent feature-length documentary “Helvetica,” centered on the titular typeface, screened worldwide when it was released in 2007. And just last year, Cambridge resident and preeminent typographer Matthew Carter won a MacArthur Grant. Carter has designed over 60 typeface families and over 250 individual fonts during his approximately five decade-long career.

The new appreciation of fonts generates popular narratives about a few fonts in particular. In a light-hearted vein, the internet has bubbled over with vitriolic hate of Comic Sans, evident in the proliferation of websites such as ihatecomicsans.com and comicsanscriminal.com. However, there is a story behind Comic Sans well known to those in graphic design that does not place the blame on the font itself but rather on a criminal overuse of it.

Comic Sans was initially designed for a very specific software program packaged into Microsoft Word that was supposed to be used for comic strips. “[It’s] a weird fluke,” says typographer-cum-lawyer Matthew J. Butterick ’92. “When people say they hate Comic Sans, what they’re saying is that we hate the people in the world who have access to Comic Sans and are not taking a moment to realize that maybe it’s not the best thing to use on the side of an ambulance.” In this case, even non-specialists see the dissonance between the font and its function. Anyone can be a critic.

Our perception of the font universe, however, is almost directly controlled by which fonts Microsoft Word chooses to package in its software. Is this is a cause for aesthetic rebellion? When Yale College requests a customized font–a font that was developed by Carter and is available to only Yale affiliates–it raises the question of whether our broad commitment to Times New Roman ignores the potential of font. For Resnick, it’s a tool that is in our control as it has never been before.

CHOOSING TYPE

Butterick, who wrote the book “Typography for Lawyers,” a guide for creating “polished and persuasive documents”, was a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator during his time at Harvard and worked at the Bow & Arrow Press. For Butterick, the reason for knowing the essentials of typography is simple: “Any time writing is important, typography is important.” His appeal to lawyers is not based on a belief that only the legal profession needs typographic intentionality; it is based on the fact that they are self-publishers. “I’m not telling lawyers that typography is the be-all and end-all of their work, but it’s part of the way you present the work and it affects how people absorb it,” Butterick says. “If typography can help you make a point, why wouldn’t you use it?”

This argument is not restricted to lawyers; any person who creates documents is a kind of self-publisher. And as much as Butterick jokes about Times New Roman being a non-choice, it does not mean it lacks a visual impact on our written content. All fonts are have a distinctive visual content, and with that a certain set of consequences. For those who print out word documents, participation in this process is unavoidable; font is never invisible. According to this line of thinking, being deliberate in font choice is a clear practical good.

There is another way of justifying the value of fonts, however, that does not rest on their instrumental value. Jake J. Freyer ’15, a Crimson design comper, has been studying and producing calligraphy since eighth or ninth grade. His academic folders are decorated with the kind of elaborate Blackletter calligraphy that would give my label maker an inferiority complex. “The way type design has developed in the past few hundred years, it’s very interesting, but it’s gone a little bit utilitarian,” Freyer muses. “I really like the old style elegance.” His disdain for a few centuries of fonts really puts in perspective music aficionados’ mourning of the seventies. By elegance, Freyer is referring to the grace of a specific set of serif-inspired typefaces, like Garamond.

The text of this article is written in a typeface with serifs, or short flicks on the end of character strokes and stems. My name above, on the other hand, is written in a sans-serif typeface, which became popular only in the nineteenth century.

I ask Freyer if he could identify fonts on sight for me. The few times he cannot identify a font immediately, he eliminates potential choices and then reflects on the history and function of a few favorites. “Caslon Pro goes back to the 1700s. William Caslon was a British typographer for the king,” Freyer recalls, while I stifle my surprise at hearing Caslon is an actual person. Freyer’s deep interest in ancient typographic figures suggests the possibility of aesthetic creativity, even historical reverence, in a form whose primary use is now in a static set of choices standardized across computers everywhere.

SEEKING INVISIBILITY

I invited Resnick to take a look at the design of The Harvard Lampoon, the so-called humor magazine that used to be occasionally published by the semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization of the same name, and The Advocate Gazing at the cover of The Harvard Lampoon, Resnick identifies two different fonts in the magazine heading. One is particularly hard to place.

“It is probably Futura, but it’s been altered by giving it parallel cuts at the edges of the ‘A’ and the ‘M’ … If you look at the tops of those letters, the sharp points, that too is very Futura,” says Resnick. The choice presents an objective set of implications. “It speaks of the industrial era but it has a little bit of Art Deco in it. There’s a little bit of decoration in it.”

As for the title of The Advocate, Resnick mines the slight curve of just one letter for a world of meaning. “The way in which it’s drawn is a digital response. Look at the way the curves are drawn, especially on the ‘C.’ It’s not a smooth ‘C,’” says Resnick. “It’s like it would be in a digital ‘C;’ it’s pixilated … The type itself, because of the way in which it is drawn, reveals to me it’s from a digital time.” To my untrained eye, I just see the third letter of the alphabet, but one letter for Resnick can tell a historical story. For typographers, the unit of meaning is miniscule. The finest grain of typographical substance is not in the differences between typefaces or even those between given letters. These atoms of meaning are the subtle curves and flourishes within each line of a letter and its infinite variations. For experts, the art in font occurs primarily at the microscopic level.

However, my inability to see these hidden meanings in font is the goal at which good typography aims. In the misuse of fonts—like Comic Sans on an ambulance—the mismatch of style and substance is clear. But when a font is achieving its purpose, it gains seamlessness, even invisibility. Then, it can be truly appreciated by those who notice a distinctly rounded serif.

“If you choose the right typeface and use it the right way, chances are the reader won’t notice,” says Freyer. “What you hope will happen is that they’ll read the text and the use of that font will make it smoother, or it will evoke the right mood.” For Freyer, this function of font is analogous to that of punctuation in a sentence. A reader may not notice each punctuation mark, but every one of them works in concert to frame the meaning of actual content.

EXPRESSIVE PRESS

Back in the Bow & Arrow Press, Ollier shows me the layout of a California Job Case, a wooden box called a typecase drawer that is used to store the letters, symbols, and numbers used in letterpress printing. The drawer is organized to make typesetting more expedient, the letterpress equivalent of our QWERTY keyboards. The letters are not arranged alphabetically and seem haphazard until Ollier explains, “The order of letters in the English language is not ‘a,’ ‘b,’ ‘c,’ ‘d,’ ‘e.’” It is in the order of greatest frequency, at least for lowercase letters: “a,” “t,” “e,” “s,” “o,” and “n.” Numerals and symbols are at the top of the case and at the right are less frequently used capital letters. I am reminded that in an art form lacking automation, this sort of preparation is necessary.

That said, the press is not a time capsule immune to the needs of modern typography. It seeks to revivify an old form but functions also to recast the digital fonts of today in their historical context. Daniel A. Gross ’13, a Student Print Master at the Bow & Arrow Press, uses Times New Roman for his papers. After two years of working at the press, he does not plan to stop using Times New Roman. However, he has an appreciation for letterpress and font choice. Perhaps it is reserved for the three hours of Open Press Night every Thursday—when any student can come and experiment with the press—and put aside when reading period comes along, but the awareness is there. “It’s nice to take things that people look at every day and charge them with significance. People read text all day long, especially at this school, and to take that kind of text [as having] an aesthetic meaning, not just an expressive meaning, is great.”

—Staff writer Hayley C. Cuccinello can be reached at hcuccinello@college.harvard.edu.