Title: Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 2, Issue 24 (29 December 1888)

Editor: Robert Coupland Harding

In: Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 2

Publication details: Robert Coupland Harding, 1888, Napier

Part of: Typo

License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence

Share:

Can any founder, English or American, furnish a neat series of signs on the new 8-point body? It is easy to get the old « brevier » in England, and there are several series to the point-system in our American specimen-books. But the latter (from ancient German punches), are so antiquated, irregular, clumsy, and altogether hideous, that we wonder that go-ahead Yankee founders are not ashamed to show them, or that any live printer will continue to mar his work by using them. Some of the younger foundries surely have cut some suitable for modern book-work founts, or have obtained « strikes » from England. If they have anything better than the antediluvian horrors that the older houses exhibit, will they oblige by sending Typo a specimen-sheet? It is the usual custom to cast signs to em set, and the neat modern style is to have most of them an en in page 113 width. Formerly signs like + and × filled the whole body, and were extravagantly large. But it would be a great convenience to printers if these characters could also be obtained to en set. Mathematical and calendar work is often confined in very narrow columns, and in closely-spaced matter it does not look well to see characters nearly related standing apart like « . » It is time that all unnecessary kerns were abolished — and seem to be made to be broken. English founders should abandon the latter in favor of the neater sign used in all other lands. The character is out of harmony with all the rest, and the name of « Herschell » as applied to the planet Uranus is as obsolete as « Georgium Sidus » We are in want of a good set. We have astronomical and mathematical signs by the pound—but to laboriously patch hundreds of small-bodied brevier sorts with paper to work with 8-point, is a task that would tax the patience of Job—and the only other alternative is to have whole pages of intricate composition reduced to pie. But we would patch away for ever rather than use such signs as we find in our American specimen-books.