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ANDREW BLUHM visits The Type Museum which, says its director, is rescuing our national printing and typographic heritage for the future.
It is an unfortunate concomitant of technical progress that it often brings a deterioration in quality. This mournful truth applies particularly to book production. In the last 500 years, few publications have equalled the beauty and elegance of the products of Aldus Manutius in 15th century Venice.
The efforts of Stanley Morison, Eric Gill and others working with the Monotype Corporation in the years between the two world wars gave a tremendous boost to typography, which had fallen by the wayside in Victorian times with the crimped and weedy "Modern" faces, but much of their best work was swept aside by the computer typesetting revolution.
Among the manufacturers of typesetting machinery - and I write with personal experience of Linotype in particular - the type design department or drawing office declined from being at the heart of the business to a mere peripheral operation. Why should electronics experts concern themselves with aesthetic matters? It would be like asking a Rugby player to take an interest in the ballet. Thus it came about that typefaces originally designed to thicken up due to the ink squash factor of letterpress printing, were reproduced in spindly forms for litho, while small capitals and non-ranging old style figures were largely abandoned and the en-rule gave way to the misapplied hyphen.
The finer points of typography disappeared from the compositor's apprenticeship syllabus and it was not long before anyone with a Mac or PC could do his or her own typesetting, sanctified by the name of desktop publishing, with results which are all too familiar. As the typesetting function emigrated to the publisher, the printer "gave up his authority on type", as Susan Shaw says, adding that the computer as applied to typesetting is "like a bolting horse".
These observations may be commonplace, but there are few like Mrs Shaw who have done so much to redress the balance. Now director of the newly established National Museum of Type in Stockwell, London, she began her career about 40 years ago by taking a course in historical bibliography at Derbyshire County Libraries and went on to work for some famous...