The History of Typography

Course Description

This course will provide a general overview of the history of typography and related letterforms in the West from the fifteenth century to the present day. It will cover description and identification of types, including moveable metal type, wood type, type for machine production, and digital type. The course will also aim to place type and lettering within historical, cultural, and political perspectives through a series of case studies that examine the creation, dissemination, and uses of type over the centuries. Topics will include specific printers, type designers, or foundries (e.g., Aldus, Granjon, Caslon, Ludlow); calligraphic influence, type design and language; type specimen books; and historical revivals. This course is intended for students with little or no experience in the history of typography. While the course does cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it largely does not overlap with T-60 The History of 19th- & 20th-Century Typography & Printing. Taught at the Newberry Library, the course will take advantage of one of the best typographical collections in the world and will feature hands-on presentations of materials. Guest speakers, as well as a field trip to a printing studio, will provide students with a further understanding of how typography was (and continues to be) used to shape the way in which we look at books. In their personal statements, applicants should describe their interest in and experience with typography or letterforms (if any), along with how the course might fit into their current work.

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Advance Reading List

Required:

Knight, Stan. Historical types: from Gutenberg to Ashendene. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press. A survey of major developments in type design from the fifteen to the twentieth century, grouped by historical period. Concise commentary about the type and its maker accompanies   photographs of each type.
~ $20 at Oak Knoll

Shaw, Paul. Revival Type. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. An exploration of digital type revivals that includes translations of letterforms not previously used as type, direct revivals of metal and wood typefaces, and looser interpretations of older fonts.
~ widely available used for around $20 – check abebooks

 

 

Highly suggested if one can put hands on it:

Geoffrey Dowding. An introduction to the history of printing types: an illustrated summary of the main stages in the development of type design from 1440 up to the present day. London: British Library; New Castle, DE : Oak Knoll Press, 1998. This book is similar in content to Knight’s Historical Types but is slightly more inclusive for the later periods. (If not interested in the whole text, we specifically recommend reading the introduction and later sections: pp. 145-208.)

Optional:

Coles, Stephen. The Anatomy of Type. New York: Harper, 2012. Very useful reference book of vocabulary for describing type (focuses on digital type but can be applied to historical type as well).

Beier, Sophie. Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility. Amsterdam: BIS, 2011. PDF freely available here.

Unger, Gerard. While You’re Reading. New York: Mark Batty, 2007. Both of the above books are about how we read and interpret type. Beier looks more at the science of type, while Unger is more philosophical.
~ Check abebooks for used copies under $30. (PDF of introduction here.)

 

 

 

 

 

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Course Evaluations

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Course History