Nineteenth-century printing shows a strange blend of the old and the new: though great innovations were made in printing technology and many new kinds of work issued from the machines, very little fresh thought was given
to matters of design. The predominant concern was with style, and in many branches of printing stylistic mantles were assumed according to prevailing interests and tastes without much concern for their suitability for the particular job in hand. Most such styles were either historically based or, particularly after the Great Exhibition, derived from foreign sources: This kind of approach to designing is particularly evident in fine books and prestige printing generally where style often served as a trimming to disguise unthinking use of traditional formulas. Hardly any branch of printing entirely escaped such influences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Only when the printer or designer was faced with new kinds of work to produce, where there were no real models to follow and where practical considerations were often paramount, did he begin to break away from his own conventions and design in order to solve particular problems.

A parallel situation is seen very clearly in nineteenth-century architecture and engineering. On the one hand there are the mock Gothic towers and classical façades of town halls, museums, and hospitals, which were built in known styles in order to impress; on the other, the unprecedented and often exciting forms of bridges and railway terminuses, which resulted from the solution of rather specific problems using, for the most part, basic engineering structures. There is little in nineteenth-century printing to compare with such masterpieces of engineering, but they certainly had their modest counter parts, and the illustration overleaf may serve as an example [287].

One of the reasons for the sterility of design in many areas of printing in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the strength of the book tradition. Some practices established in manuscript and early printed books have persisted with great consistency to this day, largely because human beings and their methods of reading have not changed significantly. Line length, for instance, may vary from one book to another according to its size and purpose, but generally speaking the number of words on a line has remained remarkably constant; and research this century has tended to confirm what printers have determined pragmatically over the centuries. There can be little to challenge in such customs; indeed, contemporary typographers might well learn something from them.

Other traditional practices in book design seem to have less general validity. Large initial letters, which originally served to decorate a manuscript or printed page as well as to identify a chapter opening or help the reader to find his way around the text [285], are now more often used as stylistic conventions and usually serve neither purpose. Contents pages of books continue to be set to the full width of the text with the items ranging to the left and the page numbers to the extreme right [286] - a practice which might satisfy some rational visual or technical structure but, especially when the entries are short, can lead to difficulties in reading. These are just two of the

conventions of book typography which still flourish and, so far as I am aware, they continued unchallenged until the late nineteenth century.

No tradition in English printing has been quite so powerful as that of the roman letter and, in particular, the letterforms used for text composition in books. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian type designs, which were themselves modelled on contemporary scripts, have survived with only minor modifications and have been adapted to suit the needs of hot-metal composing machines, photosetting, and direct impression composition. Reading rests on the understanding of conventions, and so strong has the hold of the traditional forms of the Latin alphabet been that no new designs ofletters for text composition have departed radically from the shapes and proportions of the earliest roman types. Research has shown that we prefer reading, and also read most easily, those types we are most familiar with; and there can be no stronger force in maintaining traditional forms.

The basic arrangement of the printed book was also established in Renaissance Italy, and by the end of the eighteenth century even special problems in book production had come to be solved in predictable and generally accepted ways. Basic solutions were usually adapted to suit new needs and methods of production as they arose, or were changed in style to conform with current tastes. As it happens, however, crafts often flourish under such circumstances - and printing was no exception. Compliance with conventions encourages the full exploration of possibilities within the prescribed system and leads to a continual refinement of them ; critical awareness can be sharpened through repeated experience in similar fields; and, what is

290,291 Oliver Byrne, The first six books of the elements of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners, 1847. Letterpress, printed in four colours by Charles Whittingham for the publisher William Pickering. Page size 235 X 188mm.

It must be admitted that there were often very good reasons for preserving some of the conventions of book typography. After all, even such an apparent anachronism as the numbering of the preliminary pages of a book in roman numerals and those of the rest in arabic numerals is soundly based on practical grounds. It allows the preliminary pages, which can often be written only after the main body of the book has been set, to be paginated and printed later. Nevertheless, traditional practices have inhibited the development of book design in some respects and have been so powerful that their influence on typography has extended well beyond the field of book production.

Even posters were once conceived in a form which stemmed from book typography. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the introduction of bold display types, many posters or window bills were designed according to book conventions with the main text matter set in paragraphs with their first lines indented [292]. A large initial letter was frequently used for the opening line, together with capitals for the first word or so, and the equivalent of a running headline was often placed at the top of the sheet and separated from the main text by a rule. It may be that the copy was written by the client in a formal man,ner, and that the style of writing was even modelled on the form oflanguage found in other kinds of printing, but typographic design and matters of linguistics cannot really be considered separately.

As methods of writing copy changed and large bold types were introduced, posters began to break away from the book tradition [293, 294]. It is impossible to say which of these innovations came first, but during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century a new kind of typographic poster began to be produced which made use of bold display letters to emphasise individual words or lines. In turn this too developed into a tradition which continues to this day in a rather watered-down form in the auction bills of estate agents. The ingredients of this tradition were formed from the practice of the craft itself, and are not primarily the result of the application of aesthetic principles. The need to convey information as powerfully as possible was clearly uppermost in the printer's mind, and his instinctive reaction was to use the maximum size letterforms that would fit into the available space. He would almost certainly have designed his poster in the chase, and probably on the bed of the press, and as a result many typographical posters of the nineteenth century show very clearly the limits of the rectangular shape into which the letters were fitted like children's bricks [294]. The use of condensed letters to give maximum effect to long words in narrow formats, and of expanded letters for short words in wide formats, arises quite naturally

294  Notice of entertainment, 1874. Letterpress, printed in green and black by H. Collings & Co., Bishop's Stortford. 502 X 380 mm. Essex County Record Office.

from this practice. The use of a variety of different types on the same poster may also have been determined initially by practical considerations - in this case by the limited sizes of the founts of large display letters held by the printer. Repetition of the same letter even only two or three times on the same poster may well have presented a real embarrassment to the small jobbing printer who undertook this sort of work, and an obvious solution to the problem was to turn to a different type ofa similar size. No doubt the visual possibilities of variety were soon exploited for their own sake, but the fashion for using a medley of types on posters in the nineteenth century may well have had its roots in technical problems.

The history of printing reveals many similar cases in which features originally derived from technical limitations or the characteristics of a particular process survived for purely aesthetic reasons or because of their associations. In the course of time their original significance often ceased to be understood and, as a result, they usually became debased. The survival of such forms can be seen as a symptom of uncreative designing, yet it is not without its value. Continuity of style in certain fields of printing does at least mean that categories of work can be identified by their general flavour even before their contents can be read. An auction sale poster can usually be distinguished at a glance from a poster for a concert in the Royal Festival Hall, and so can a legal document from a piece of sales literature. This is an important function of design in printing, and the value of conventions as an aid to recognition should not be underestimated. In spoken language the linguist distinguishes a variety of registers which are commonly used in different circumstances when presenting a scientific paper, reprimanding children, talking to one's lover, and so forth - and these too must depend on a residue of convention in order to have the desired effect.

Examples of the survival of conventions in printing outside the book field are plentiful in the nineteenth century, and some have lasted well into the twentieth century. One of the strongest of these is the survival of the engraved style in work such as letterheads, invoices, invitations, and music titles. It was already firmly established in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and is typified by the curving and swelling lines which arise from the way in which the lozenge-shaped burin is worked across the copper, making wider marks as it cuts deeper into the metal [295]. The shapes of the letters were mainly based on those of the great writing masters of the eighteenth century,
and their ornate flourishes were easily adapted to engraving. The burin lent itself to the translation of this style as it moves most naturally in wide sweeping curves in much the same way as figure skaters on ice. This method of working lasted well into the present century for the production of many

298  Invoice of George Hadfield & Co. Ltd, 1930. Lithographed heading, the text overprinted letterpress. 262 X 206 mm.

The practice of printing an engraved vignette ofa tradesman's shop, workshop, or factory on his notepaper and invoices also continued as a general convention right through the nineteenth century, and was only really abandoned after the Second World War [297,298]. The familiar custom in such work of using an integrated design consisting of both picture and words was originally evolved in copper-engraving, but was later taken over in lithography and, with rather more difficulty, in wood-engraving.

The engraved tradition also left its mark on security printing and postage stamps. The engraved patterns and copper-engraved styles oflettering used in the early nineteenth century for bank-notes, promissory notes, and passports had a very wide influence, and they still survive in emasculated and rather unconvincing forms in similar work produced today. A particularly

persistent example of this is the elaborate scroll work found on copperengraved exchequer notes of the seventeenth century [299]. Such documents were designed to be cut down the middle of the patterns and separated, and both the line of the cut and the complex and varied patterns had then to be matched exactly. The forms of such patterns derived from pen work and were reinforced by the copper-engraver's burin. They were widely used on copper-engraved notes and cheques for a century or more [300], and from the end of the eighteenth century the typefounders produced similar designs for letterpress printing which were known as 'cheques' [301]. In the course of time these cheque patterns ceased to have any practical value as a means of preventing forgery and came to be used merely for their association with security printing [302, 303].

When Frederick Heath engraved the designs for the Penny Black postage stamp, which was issued in 1840, he adopted as a matter of course the familiar swellii1g lines and dot-and-Iozenge techniques of copper-engraving to model the young Queen Victoria's head [304]. Later designers of postage stamps were even more influenced by copper-engraving and placed the sovereign's head within an oval, which was a practice that had flourished in portrait engraving for centuries. The placing ofa profile portrait within some kind of oval framework continued in British stamps until recently, and so too did the method of hatching used to model the head. A tradition of this kind could hardly survive in a very vital form for over a century and, as with bank-notes, there has been a gradual but progressive decline in the standard of such work.

One very persistent graphic idiom which has survived for over 400 years is the chiaroscuro print—a method of printing one or more tones of the same colour (usually buff or straw) either with or without a black working. It was originally developed in woodcutting in the early sixteenth century as a means of reproducing tonal drawings, but it was revived and adapted by John BaptistJackson and Elisha Kirkall in the eighteenth century and used for other purposes as well. From then on the chiaroscuro print had an enormous influence and became one of the accepted idioms in which printed images of all kinds could be conceived. In this country its popularity was assured when William Gilpin began to produce books based on his picturesque tours which contained aquatint plates tinted by hand with monochrome washes of water-colour, usually buff or straw in colour. Gilpin eXplained his recourse to these tints as a means of counteracting the glaring whiteness of the paperthough he must also have been influenced by the current use of the Claude glass, which was a piece of amber-tinted glass which the eighteenth-century connoisseur used to hold in front of an English view to give it the golden glow of the Italian campagna as seen in Claude Lorraine's paintings. Right from the early days oflithography a tint stone was used in Germany to support the black printing, partly because of its association with German chiaroscuro woodcuts, and partly because the tone could be used to give the paper much the same colour as the lithographic stone on which the drawing was made. In addition, when highlights were scraped away from the tint stone, it could be used as a means of imitating drawings on tinted paper touched up with white. The chiaroscuro method was very popular with German lithographers and for a short period after 1817 it began to be used in this. coun try too; then, as a result oftechnical improvements made in the mid-1830s, it became almost the accepted idiom for making lithographs all over Europe. The style was also taken up in wood-engraving in the nineteenth century, first of all in the Illustrations to Puckle's Club (1820), then by Savage, Baxter, and others, and later in some of the large wood-engraved plates of the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. The style was again adapted to new purposes when process engraving was perfected, and the printing of double-toned

305  Auction bill, Martin & Pole, Reading, 1969. Letterpress, printed in blue on yellow paper by the Creative Press, Reading. 890 X 572 mm.

306  Auction bill, Hampton & Sons, London, 1969. Letterpress, printed in blue and black by Rawlinsons Ltd, Northwood. 894 X 572 mm.

307  Auction bill, A. C. Frost & Co., Burnham, 1969. Letterpress, printed in red and black by Rawlinsons Ltd, Northwood. 763 X 509 mm.

half-tone blocks in black and buffwas extremely popular for a long time, and before the Second World War even warranted a special classification in process engravers' price lists.

The technique of compound-plate printing, which is described in the chapter on colour printing, also had a lasting influence. It was originally invented in an attempt to prevent the forgery of bank-notes and other security printing, but it very soon began to be copied. An important early use of the process was for the coronation of George IV in 1821 ; and for that occasion, while the tickets to view the ceremony in Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall were printed by the genuine compound-plate method [397, 398], the less important pass tickets were merely printed in two colours in imitation of the style of compound-plate prints [348-50]. By this time the style had already become associated with a particular kind of printing. Some firms, such as Stephens, the ink makers, began by using the process for their labels as a means of assuring the public of the authenticity of their products, but ended by copying only the appearance of such prints.

A few more examples may help to emphasise the persistence of conventions in printing. A familiar feature of estate agents' auction bills is the reversed-out logotype [305-7], which stems from a technique frequently used in the second quarter of the nineteenth century [308]. The traditional estate agents'

310
311 | 312 | 313

Indenture logotypes. Examples of style surviving changes in methods of production:

310  Manuscript, 1786. Essex County Record Office.

311  Copper-engraved, 1841. Museum oj English Rural Life, Reading University.

312  Lithographed, 1851. Essex County Record OJfice.

313  Letterpress, cast logotype from V. & J. Figgins, Epitome of specimens, c. 1850.
St Bride Printing Library.

Sufficient examples have been given to show the extent to which printing styles and conventions have been influenced by technical considerations, and how some of the conventions survived for a long time even after the original methods of production had changed. These were the main forces that worked from within the printing and allied trades to shape the appearance of printing; but other influences, both social and artistic, were brought to bear from outside.

Art and architecture have played a significant part in the appearance of printing and from time to time have been responsible for major waves of change, the ripples of which eventually spread far and wide to become absorbed in the mainstream of printing. An account of such changes would be a record ofthe history of the art of the period and must be looked for elsewhere, but it is worth mentioning that the appearance of printing, at least in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seems to have been the result of a continual tug-of-war between the influences of function, technique, and convention on the one hand and the forces of current fashion on the other. Of course, these influences need not be in conflict with one another, and sometimes there does seem to have been a basic harmony between them. As examples of this we may take the charming embossed designs of Dobbs and others of the 1820s [314] which lent themselves naturally to the translation of the stucco ornaments made fashionable in the previous century by Robert Adam [315], or the striking poster designs of E. McKnight Kauffer of the

314  Trade card of Dobbs & Co., c. 1821. Copper-engraving with embossed border. 116 X 165 mm. John Johnson Collection.

315  Robert Adam, detail of stucco ceiling in the dining room in Hatchlands Park, Worsley, 17S8-9.

316  E. McKnight KaufTer, London Underground poster, 1923. Colour lithography, printed by Vincent Brooks, Day & Son Ltd, London. London Transport Museum.

317  Wassily Kandinsky, 'Battle', 1910. Painting in the Tate Gallery. 945 X 1300 mm. Tate Gallery

The Gothic Revival (the only important revival of the nineteenth century that printing could legitimately share with architecture) produced its pioneers who designed for printing, and Henry Shaw, Owen Jones, and Noel Humphreys produced impressive work in this style because of their genuine enthusiasm for the art of the Middle Ages. But a private indulgence of this kind provided no long-term alternative to the less idiosyncratic and selfconscious typography of the Georgian era, and eventually led to half a century of derivative work [318]. Similarly, William Morris's return to the past, though it had its imitators for a decade or so, and though it was more fundamental in its objectives, provided no real answer for the future. Art Nouveau, Futurism, Cubism, de Stijl, and Dada have all left their mark on printing, and so too have the numerous post-war art movements. Like the Gothic Revival, however, their role has been to provide a visual repertoire of style, and for the most part they have only affected advertising, magazines, and similar categories of printing. Even the work of the Bauhaus in Germany, which of all movements had the most to offer printing and other areas of design, tended to be seen in England at the time only for its superficial qualities of modernity, such as clean-looking lines, and its essential message was at first overlooked.

New approaches to design in printing grew out of the social and economic necessity in an industrialised society of communicating clearly, widely, and persuasively. They began to make themselves felt in the first half of the nineteenth century in fairly routine work, such as road and railway guides, timetables, directories, plans, accounts, catalogues, and price lists, and later on in advertising and packaging as well. Numerous examples of work of various kinds can be found among the illustrations in the second part of this book. The originality and effectiveness of the ordering of the information in such printing is often taken for granted because it works so well. Bradshaw's first railway timetables, for instance, which were produced small enough to fit easily into the pocket or purse, are masterly examples of sensible designing [319]. Complex information about times, distances, stations, and fares
is organised in a form which is easily intelligible, and this general pattern has been followed for over a century. Some surprisingly graphic methods of presenting information were also developed in the nineteenth century. As examples we may take the popular broadsheets showing in pictorial form

the sequence of carriages in coronation and funeral processions [394], the colour-printed column chart displaying statistical information relating to attendance, publications sold, and refreshments consumed during the course of the Great Exhibition [320], or the diagrams mentioned above which were printed in four colours as an aid to the understanding of geometry [290,291].

Such typographic and graphic work had to be planned from scratch; fresh approaches were inevitable as there were no real models to follow. The book printer, on the other hand, knew from his experience of past jobs just how
a book should be organised, and the accepted conventions of book production were described by the authors of printers' manuals for a century or more. The only major decisions which remained to be taken by the printer concerned type size and spacing between the lines; and these decisions were made, if we are to judge by the manuals, on the basis of the number of pages a book should make. I can find no reference in such manuals to designing or planning a book in advance, beyond casting off the copy to calculate the number of pages. The designing was presumably done on the shop floor by the compositor or the overseer, with perhaps just the client's instruction to follow a particular precedent—and, of course, a great deal of designing is still done this way. Such methods would have been oflittle avail, however, where there were no precedents to follow and where the material was not straightforward; and at some stage, and I suspect in the nineteenth century, it became common practice for designs to be tried out in advance on paper.

A number of drawings which appear to be layouts for the famous Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 have recently been published,43 and some rough sketches for Plantin's title-pages have also survived. The first English printer who
is recorded as having prepared layouts seems to have been T. C. Hansard, though he makes no mention of the practice in his extensive manual, Typographia, which was published in 1825. Though little seems to be known about the origins of the practice of working out typographic designs on paper, it proved to have great significance because it released typography from the tyranny of some of its craft-based conventions. Like so many radical changes, however, it has had some unfavourable repercussions, and in this century has led to the emergence of a new kind of designer, often working independently of the printing trade, who only too frequently knows less than he needs to about the industrial processes he is designing for.

The first important break with one of the most enduring traditions of printing came with the challenge to the principle of symmetry. This tradition, which is rooted in the ideas of Renaissance humanism, began to be undermined in the nineteenth century as a result of various stylistic and technical influences. The Gothic Revival had drawn attention to the great variety of medieval manuscripts, many of which were not organised within such a strict geometrical framework as printed books. While manuscripts were usually written within some kind of grid, which was repeated from page to page for the sake of convenience, it did not impose nearly such rigid limitations as those demanded by the craft of printing and was modified as occasion demanded according to linguistic and decorative needs. It is also a characteristic of the Western tradition of writing that it is easier to start lines at the left-hand margin than to centre them, as centred lines involve very careful planning. In letterpress printing, on the other hand, any break with the overall rectangular structure of a type area presents considerable technical problems, though either method of composing lines can be adopted with equal ease.

The study of medieval manuscript books in the nineteenth century revealed a structural freedom which, for both technical and philosophical reasons, was not found in early printed books; and it upset the well-established convention of symmetry. But though some printers were prepared to abandon symmetry from around the middle of the nineteenth century as a means of producing books in a medieval style, the positive practical advantages of the change were not appreciated at this stage. Later on in the century the widespread interest in the intuitive and, to Western eyes, unorthodox aspects of Japanese art left its mark on printing, and led Whistler to experiment with asymmetric typography in a more enlightened and original way in a few of his manifestoes and exhibition catalogues [321].

The rapid commercial growth oflithography in the jobbing field with the introduction of powered machines shortly after the middle ofthe nineteenth century was another reason for the movement away from symmetrical design. Lithography imposed very few technical limitations on the appearance of printing and lithographic artists and letterers explored its possibilities to the full, deriving their inspiration from all kinds of sources and combining images and words in every conceivable way. In face of this threat from lithography the letterpress jobbing printer developed a similar style in the 1880s [322] which became known as Artistic Printing or the Leicester Free Style (as it was particularly popular among Leicester printers). It is typified by the rejection of many of the conventions which stemmed from the traditional craft ofletterpress printing: symmetry was abandoned, words and ornaments were irrationally placed, decorative rules and flowers were used with great abandon, and jobs were frequently printed in close register in many colours. Such virtuoso pieces of typography were made easier by the invention ofa machine which could bend plain or patterned rules into all sorts of shapes for decorative purposes, and by the invention of the small
jobbing platen machine which gave accurate register. All the same, the time spent in setting work of this complexity could only be justified economically because of the greater output of the new machines and the longer runs which were needed to meet growing markets.

Though William Morris and some of his followers in the Private Press Movement took up the practice of ranging their text to the left on title-pages, book typography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the most part held firmly to the principle of symmetry. It was only in jobbing printing that the tradition was seriously challenged. There was no real dogma behind the change, however, and symmetry was abandoned at first in the course of producing novel and exciting visual effects, without any serious alternatives being explored.

The real break with symmetry, and other aspects of the typographic tradition as well, came in the twentieth century; and it formed part of a much wider movement in art, architecture, and industrial design which challenged accepted concepts and sought to find new forms more suited to the machine age. Isolated pleas for a new approach to design which openly embraced the machine were made in America and Europe around the turn of the century by Frank Lloyd Wright, Henri van de Velde, and other architects. By the outbreak of the First World War the movement had taken root on the continent and had begun to find enthusiastic support from groups of imp assioned artists. Typography began to be affected by these new ideas just before the war when the Italian Futurist leader, Marinetti [323], used a more dynamic approach to typography in some of the movement's manifestoes 'to give words all the speed and power of aeroplanes, trains, waves, of explosives, of the sea spray, of atomic energy' .44 Soon after the war the Russian El Lissitzky, who came under the influence of the Suprematist painter Malevich in Russia, began exploring the visual possibilities of words in some of his own paintings and, later on, in printed work as well. He moved to Berlin in 1921, where he met many of the most advanced thinkers in the arts and took advantage of the better printing facilities to produce some of his most original typography [324]. Thereafter, he travelled widely in Europe and became one of the main channels through which the new ideas about typography and graphic design were spread.

New approaches to typography were explored more systematically at the art school, known as the Staatliches Bauhaus, which was founded by the architect Walter Gropius at Weimar in 1919. Though Gropius did not lay down any firm policy at the Bauhaus, he tried to reconcile some of the ideals of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, which had influenced him strongly, with the needs of industrial production; and by the time he came to set up the Bauhaus he had already completed the buildings which form the cornerstone of twentieth-century architecture and bear witness to an approach which has since become central to the development of design theory. Typography became part of the Bauhaus curriculum only after the school's move to Dessau in 1925. Like other areas of design taught there, it was approached with a real regard for function, an understanding of production methods, complete freedom from the fetters of tradition, and an underlying modernity of style. The typography produced by Herbert Bayer [325] and others at the Bauhaus in the 1 920S marks the most profound change in the appearance of printing since its invention, and represents the first serious attempt to develop an approach which came to terms with the needs of both the user and the machine.

The traditional centred approach catered reasonably well for most problems encountered in book design, but it was not nearly adaptable enough to cater for the needs of advertising and business printing and took no account of the advent of the typewriter. In answer to these new requirements the typographers of the Bauhaus abandoned the symmetrical layout and placed their type in meaningful groups of words or sen tences; and in doing so often arrived at striking visual arrangements. They frequently set words or lines of type at right angles to one another and used heavy rules and simple geometrical shapes to produce powerful abstract arrangements. They also used space as a positive factor in their designs and made great play with contrasts of scale, setting a single word or line of type in a very large size in close proximity to passages of text in composition sizes. The sanserifwas regarded as the type most in keeping with the spirit of the machine age; its clean lines and geometrical shapes harmonised well with the prevailing style, and it marked the most obvious break with the black-letter tradition of German printing. The pictorial equivalent of the sanserif letter was photography, which was seen by Bauhaus designers as the most objective, powerful, and immediate means of pictorial communication.

A similar break with the past was made in Germany in the late 1920s by Jan Tschichold. Though he never worked at the Bauhaus, he shared many of the same ideals and became the publicist of the new movement in typography. In 1928 he published his Die neue Typographie [326] and in 1935 his Typographische Gestaltung, in both of which he described the new asymmetrical approach to design for printing and demonstrated some of its applications. Tschichold's work was more restrained than that of the Bauhaus typographers and shows a greater respect for the meaning of the text and the method of production; and it is probably for these reasons that it has had a more lasting influence on the printing trade.

The ideas promoted with such enthusiasm on the continent met with little favour in this country, where printing was still dominated by the book tradition. English typography was undergoing its own quiet revolution, and Stanley Morison, Francis Meynell, Bernard Newdigate, Harold Curwen, and Oliver Simon showed their dissatisfaction with the muddle of Victorian and Edwardian printing by reviving a straightforward approach to typography based on the finest examples from the past. Most of the examples they turned to were books, and the lessons learned from book production were applied with great discrimination by the Curwen Press and other quality printers to the field of jobbing work.

The German magazine Gebrauchsgraphik, founded in 1925, was one of the earliest channels through which the avant-garde graphic designer in England came to hear about the new continental ideas. In the first place, as might
be expected, the influence of continental design made itself felt in advertising. In the 1920S the posters and other publicity designs of McKnight Kauffer and the work of the most enterprising agencies, such as Crawford's, where Ashley Havinden was designer, and Greenly's, began to take on exciting new visual forms [327]. The change revealed a new freedom of spirit in design rather than any particular dogma, but the trappings of continental design and painting were taken up with great verve. Many of the visual images derived in a generill way from cubist painting and other forms of modern art, and the use of bold lettering, often set on the slant, stems from German typography. It was the advertisers too who abandoned for a time the practice of beginning proper nouns with capital letters and used German types, such as Erbar, Kabel, and Futura.

In the early 1930S the ideals of the New Typography began to be set out for all the British printing trade to read in articles in Commercial Art, Printing Review, and Penrose Annual. Tschichold wrote an article entitled 'New life
in print' which appeared in Commercial Art (July 1930), and in 1935 an exhibition of his work was held in the London offices of the printing and publishing firm of Percy Lund, Humphries, for which he worked for a time as consultant typographer [328, 329]. However, there were far fewer advocates of the New Typography than there were opponents, and even those typographers who did attempt to practise it did so with little real understanding. With the exception of the Penrose Annual for 1938, which was designed by

Tschichold himself [330], the book seems to have escaped its influence almost entirely in the inter-war years; and when Stanley Morison declared in his First principles of typography that book typography 'requires an obedience
to convention which is almost absolute'45 he was almost certainly echoing majority current opinion.

Nevertheless, the New Typography did leave its mark on jobbing printing in this period, and the popularity of Gill Sans, which was often used in the 1930s as a means of giving printing a modern look, must be partly seen as a product of German influence. Stanley Morison's arresting book jackets for the publisher Gollancz and Francis Meynell's press advertisements of the 1930s also show a refreshing new outlook which seems to owe something to continental influences. Some English printing can be more specifically related to the new approach to design for printing. The catalogue of Greenly's second exhi bi tion of modern advertising (1930) is a vigorous pastiche of Bauhaus typography [331-4]; the use of heavy rules and juxtaposed rectangles of type clearly relates to their style, and so too does the visual impact gained by printing in black and green on silver card. The publicity booklet of the match maker Bryant & May Ltd, which was printed in the early 1930s by the Curwen Press with a cover design by Paul Nash and photographs by Bruguiere, is a more restrained example of the influence of the new approach to typography and graphic design [335, 336]. The narrow margins of the text pages and the use of photographs which bleed off the page are deliberate breaks with traditional practice, though it will be noted that the headings are centred on the page. For the most part English typographers of the interwar years did not understand the full significance of the New Typography, and certainly did not see its implications in the fields of business and information printing.

Not until after the Second World War were the possibilities of the New Typography really explored widely in this country, first by a few pioneers, such as Anthony Froshaug, Ernest Hoch, and Herbert Spencer, and then more generally in the 1950s as a result of the influence of Swiss typography. What was originally seen in England as an experiment with visual elements began to be taken for its important design implications—as an approach
to typography more widely adaptable to a range of requirements than the traditional symmetrical approach.

The increasing use during the last decade of text set with even spacing between words and a ragged edge to the right, which was itself partly the consequence of the widespread acceptance of the typewriter, must also be seen as a contributory factor in the relaxation of the hold of symmetry. It is a practice which encourages the ranging of headings to the left and, of course, results in an arrangement of type which has an irregular profile to the right and is therefore asymmetric. The introduction of ragged-edge setting has also begun to modify the traditional view that facing pages of a book should be considered together as a balanced arrangement of two parts which are virtual mirror images of one another [337]. Though the individual pages of a traditional book mayor may not be more or less symmetrically arranged, the placing of items such as page numbers and running headlines off-centre has been accepted traditionally only when they conformed to an overall scheme of symmetry which applied to both pages, that is, when they were placed to the extreme left and right respectively of opposite pages. Raggededge setting cannot be accommodated by such a scheme of symmetry, and its widespread use has led to a breakdown of the monopoly of the traditional view of the book and to an acceptance that facing pages may equally well
be considered as two separate but related parts arranged side by side [338].

The long-term significance of the New Typography does not lie in determining whether or not type should be symmetrically disposed on a page, any more than the modern architect is concerned as a matter of principle with whether to place the front door in the centre of a house. Symmetry has come to be regarded asjust one of a number of possibilities. The real contribution of the New Typography is that it brought about a new approach to design for printing based neither on outmoded craft conventions nor on preconceived aesthetic principles, but one in which the principal concern is to find an appropriate solution to a particular problem which has as a prime consideration the needs of the reader. It is only fair to say that we do not yet know exactly what these are, and, of course, any piece of printing is likely to be read by thousands of very different individuals; but there has been a growing feeling in this country and elsewhere in the last decade that design for printing should be approached by first asking the question, 'Howcan what we want to communicate be ordered so as to be most easily understood?'

337  Petrus de Crescentiis, Ruralia commoda, Augsburg, 1471. Letterpress, printed by Johann Schussler. Page size 298 X 215 mm. Reading Universiry Library.

338  Penrose Annual, vol. 62, 1969. Letterpress, designed by Herbert Spencer and printed by Lund, Humphries, London and Bradford. Page size 295 X 210 mm.

New approaches to the design of printed material have really been forced upon the typographer by developments in society as a whole. The growing demands of business, government, and scholarship have made it essential that printing is read as quickly, effectively, and with as little physical strain as possible. Information may need to be read at different levels so that some readers can skip through and pick up the essence of the contents just by reading the headings; other information might perhaps be better expressed in simple diagrammatic form. The very quantity of printing produced in the last few decades taxes others besides the reader; if printing is not consigned to the wastepaper basket it has to be classified, catalogued, and stored. This has led to an increasing use in a number of countries of a rational system of standard formats for information printing based on a national standard which was adopted in Germany in the I920s. Methods oflearning and transmitting information have also brought about changes in printing. The growth of programmed learning techniques has led to new kinds of printing which are not sequential in the normal sense, but are designed to be followed by readers in many different ways. The use of diagrammatic methods for presenting orderly sequences of operations, known as algorithms, which have been used by scientists for the purposes of problem solving and communication for some time, have also begun to be applied more generally in order to simplify instructions for the general public [339]. The advent of television and the widespread use of photographic imagery have helped to create a generation much more reliant on visual means of communication than ever before, and have led to an increasing use of pictures and diagrams in printing both to stimulate and to inform. All these changes call for new approaches to the design of printing where reference to examples from the past can be of little immediate help.

The challenge to traditional practices in typography has been encouraged by recent technical developments. The widespread use of offset lithography, which allows a greater freedom in arranging text in relation to illustrations on a wide range of papers, has helped to break down the convention of printing images separate from the text which stemmed from the days when copper plates were used for illustrations. The increasing use of high-quality typewriters has made us more accustomed to text set with a ragged edge to the right, and has led to the questioning of the need for the extensive founts of type used in traditional printing which normally include lower-case letters, capitals, small capitals, italics, figures, superior figures, and a variety of other symbols, as well as related bold alphabets. New methods of reproducing graphic material, such as xerography and microfilm, have drawn attention to the need for letterforms, illustrations, and overall design which satisfy a variety of purposes.

Above all, the increasing use of computers in connection with traditional composing machines and cathode-ray tubes has forced the typographer to reconsider some of his conventions. While computers can be programmed to copy most features of traditional typography, they can do some things very much cheaper than others. The most subtle letter designs of the past and the most complex typographical arrangements can already be simulated reasonably well on a cathode-ray tube in response to purely numerical data from a computer [340], but the cost in computer time is at present extremely high. Though it is almost certain that costs will come down gradually, the expense of implementing complex traditional designs compared with others planned with the machine function in mind is bound to remain high. What may be a simple mental and manual activity for the compositor is not necessarily easy for the programmer nor good use of computer time. The introduction of computers into the field of printing in the last decade has merely emphasised the already existing need in a complex industry for

typographic designers who are able to understand the limitations and possibilities of the technology at their disposal. The typographer of today, like his counterpart in the late eighteenth century, is concerned with planning; but his problems are more varied, the tools at his disposal are infinitely more complex, and he has to specify accurately so that others who may not even speak the same language can understand his intentions [341, 342].

For all the technological developments in printing in recent years, the hold of tradition has been very strong. The printing industry, with its longstanding trade and craft traditions, has a great sense of history. Reading is one of the most conventional of human activities and, despite recent trends, many still believe that the printed word is the surest and most effective means of communication, particularly from one generation to another. Yet if radical changes are ever to be made in our letterforms and the conventions we adopt for organising them, no greater opportunity is likely to arise than in this present period of transition from mechanisation to automation. The technological advances of the last decade are of even greater significance for printing than those of the nineteenth century, but the very necessary experimental work in the use of words and pictures for purposes of communication has lagged far behind. When all is said and done, a computer can only do what it is instructed to do. This axiom was phrased very precisely by Lady Lovelace in 1842 with regard to the first real digital computer, Charles Babbage's newly invented analytical machine, when she stated that 'It has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform'. 46

At the time of writing, it seems that engineers are ordering the machine to perform in printing what years of experience have shown works reasonably well. Conventions and the desire to emulate the finest and most complex productions of traditional printing are still such powerful forces that the introduction of computers into the field of printing during the last decade has had little influence on its appearance. The first computer-set Bible, published for the British & Foreign Bible Society by William Collins in January 1968, is a case in point [343]. Large initial letters, which were something of an anachronism when they were taken over into printing from the manuscript tradition, have been used for its chapter openings and a computer was programmed to instruct 'Monotype' composition casters to leave the appropriate spaces in the text so that the letters themselves, as well as illustrations of various shapes, could be dropped in by hand afterwards. Many other works which have been set with the help of computers, such as telephone directories, bibliographies, and newspapers, have also been made indistinguishable from conventionally produced printing both as a point of honour and as a commercial expedient. History records many precedents of this kind, and it is worth recalling that when the first printers experimented in the mid-fifteenth century by casting metal units and assembling them into lines of words they took for their models the contemporary manuscript books they saw around them.