History of Typography

I am teaching the history of typography this summer for the third time, and once again I am reminded that the history of typography (at least in Europe), from its inception to the present, is a representation of the events of the more general history of culture, and often, a harbinger of future developments. The Gutenberg press was the model for industrialization and mass production, the adoption of the Carolingian letter by early printers signaled the beginning of Humanism as the foundation for European society for the next 500 years, leading to the Enlightenment and, eventually, 20th C Modernism, which, though a bit tattered and tarnished, is still with us today. The typefaces and styles that have recorded these 500 years also shed light on the cultural forces at work, as well as the technologies of the time. Around 1900, typography even gives us advance indications of what is to come: the mining of the past, and the development of new, idiosyncratic typefaces as much about themselves as anything else, can be interpreted as an early form of postmodernism, as the logical conclusion of the evolution of the Roman typeface had been reached with the faces of Didot and Bodoni at the turn of the 19th century. Looking at what happened then, the typographical free-for-all and then the typographical upheaval associated with the social upheavals of the 18th and 19th centuries culminating in the First World War, we may gain some insight into what is happening, and what will happen, today when we are living through a technological revolution that is qualitatively not unlike the industrial revolution that was taking place 200 years ago. Looking at how typographical forms are used today may give some idea about what is coming in the future, not just in typography, but in the culture as a whole.

But when I tell people I teach type history, I often get the impression that they think it is irrelevant.