The Typography of Syriac: A Historical Catalogue of Printing Types, 1537–1958 (review)

The field of the historical typography of Hebrew is vast, and contributions to the subject are scattered far and wide. Its sister Semitic languages of Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Samaritan have until recently fared no better. Arabic typography, with its rich flowering of typefaces in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is mostly covered in regional surveys but has no general treatment. Ethiopic, of which some thirty typefaces are known from the sixteenth century until the early twentieth, is currently being surveyed by John Lane, while a first survey of some thirty-five Samaritan types has been published by Alan Crown (2001). And now for Syriac the definitive study of all its known typefaces has been published. Dr Coakley, from 1993 to 2007 Senior Lecturer in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and since 2008 on the staff of the Cambridge University Library, is well known for his publications on the Syriac language and typography, and on the Protestant Mission to the Assyrian Church of the East. He is also the owner of the Jericho Press, a private press operating with many oriental types discarded from the Oxford and Cambridge University presses. These two interests have culminated in the book reviewed here.

The preliminaries consist in a preface for students of typography, another for students of Syriac, and a full bibliography, together comprising thirty-four pages. In the Introduction proper an outline is given of the Syriac script, of the Aramaic language behind the script, and of Syriac type. 'Printing in Syriac' (pp. 1–3) explains the attraction Syriac had for sixteenth-century biblical scholars, especially in connection with the New Testament tradition. 'The Syriac Script' (pp. 4–17) surveys with many illustrations the history of Syriac manuscript writing, to be distinguished in estrangela (the older form), serto or West Syriac, which took over in the manuscripts from the eighth century, and East Syriac, incorrectly styled Nestorian in the older publications, which developed from the sixteenth century in the lands of the Church of the East. The serto script predominates in all kinds of Syriac printing from the beginning until about 1850. After that, serto was displaced by estrangela in scholarly publications based on early manuscripts. The proliferation of East Syriac types dates from the same time, and the author has broken new ground by tracing no fewer than twenty-two new types after 1850. A final section (pp. 17–24) discusses the technical demands made on the type designers of Syriac type, arising from it being a cursive script demanding special solutions for connecting and pointing.

Then follows a complete chronological survey of all the different printing types for serto (sixty-eight, forty-seven of them dating from before 1850), estrangela (twenty-seven, twelve of them pre-1850), and East Syriac (thirty-four, eleven pre 1850) up to the Monotype era; Monotype and Linotype fonts are discussed in a concluding chapter. But if we include all the reappearances with or without replacement letters, or adaptations of a given font, and the different sizes within a font, we come to an astounding 218 types, each meticulously researched for pedigree, first occurrence, technical peculiarities, and, importantly, all illustrated at actual size. One could question the wisdom of differentiating in the numbering between the three different scripts of Syriac, but extensive cross-referencing overcomes this split in the diachronical approach.

The author freely shares with the reader his views on the aesthetic qualities of different fonts, and by bolstering his views with detailed technical arguments he brings the types to life and shows the intimate knowledge he has of type cutting and typesetting. We cannot refrain from listing a number of these judicious comments. The Richter 1611 type is 'the prototype of the "gothic" serto' and marks 'the most important step in the degradation of Syriac type-design in Northern...