Type by Simon Loxley

Author:Simon Loxley [Loxley, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857730176
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

47 Isn’t this a lovely day? The Fred and Ginger of Monotype, Stanley Morison (left) and Beatrice Warde, still wining and dining in the cause, decades on.

Morison ventured into type design only once, but the result became the most successful typeface ever designed. The advertising manager of The Times newspaper had approached Monotype with a view to selling them some ad space; as part of the deal he offered to have the advertisement set by The Times’ compositors. Morison, outraged by this suggestion, announced he’d rather pay them not to set it, so poor did he consider the current state of the paper’s typography. This remark eventually made its way back to the newspaper’s management, who responded by challenging Morison to come up with something better. In the proposal for the new typeface that Morison submitted, under the sub-heading ‘No “arty” types required in The Times’, he stated: ‘It is hoped that the experimental fount now in preparation for scrutiny by the Committee will have at least the merit of being free from all that is academic or “arty” … Type should not ape calligraphy; it should first and last, look like type, but good type – i.e., good for its purpose.’

To the contemporary eye, The Times in the 1920s would not make for enticing reading – broadsheet pages, much larger than those of today’s newspaper, divided into narrow columns of dense type unrelieved by pictures or large headlines. Morison’s new face was drawn by Victor Lardent, a draughtsman at the newspaper, and made its first appearance on 3 October 1932. Solid and businesslike, the characters were designed to have no sharp angles to trap ink and subsequently smudge, and could be read easily, even in the smallest-ever typesize, 4.5pt. The Times’ leader for that day made note of its arrival, pointing out that the work of the private presses in improving book typography had also led to an increase in readers’ expectations from their daily read: ‘It is more of a commonplace to typographer than to layman how fine a shade of difference with how vast a consequence may distinguish type from type. But for the layman there is mystery enough, even after centuries of printing, in the facility with which its fixed mechanical symbolism can take so sensitive an impression of life and spirit.’

Clearly the paper recognized the significance of its makeover, and that it would be of interest to their readers too, if only to put at ease the minds of those who’d noticed that something was different about the paper, but couldn’t for the life of them put their finger on what it was.

The Times had sole usage rights to their typeface only for a year, after which it went on general release. It’s hard to imagine this happening today, when everything is nailed down as regards usage and copyright. Would The Times’ management have been amazed if they had known that sixty years later Times New Roman, or a digitized version of it, would be

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