A Note on the Type

The text of this book is set in andersen, named for seventeenth-century founder Jan Andersen. Nils Pieter, an apprentice to Andersen, is credited with the design. The two shared a long correspondence after Pieter’s apprenticeship, and the type appears based on Andersen’s handwriting. The irregular shape of the serifs makes this type an impractical choice for most printed matter.

Little is known of the designer of hrosvitha. The type is the sole extant creation of a German nun of the sixteenth century. How she acquired the skills to create such an elaborate type remains a mystery, but the influence of illuminated texts is obvious. The type was named for the earliest known female playwright, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim. Though popular for a time in early 1930s Germany, the type is lately considered quaint and difficult to read.

This book has been set in elegantine. Lord Randolph Sterling designed the type in the 1890s, exclusively for the setting of his wife’s books. Marianne Sterling was the daughter of a milliner and a seamstress. After Lord Sterling’s father disowned him, Marianne supported the family by writing erotica. Shortly after the turn of the century, Sterling’s father was embarrassed at a party by a recitation of his daughter-in-law’s writing. He arranged to have the couple “frightened,” with the hope that he could subsequently offer them passage to America and so be rid of his shame. During the planned melee at Sterling’s workshop, Randolph Sterling was accidentally killed. Marianne was committed to an insane asylum.

suwannee modern was created in 1972 by Jonathan Howell. The Georgia native worked as a graphic artist in Manhattan, drawing advertisements for Bloomingdale’s. He designed this type specifically for poster lettering. suwannee modern enjoyed popularity during the 1980s among a group of women artists, whose guerrilla-style postering attracted the attention of Garment District workers and the homeless, who used the posters as bedsheets. A few of these posters have been collected to form a traveling exhibition, which has revived interest in this little-known artistic movement. Most of the posters have been lost to time and the weather.

This book has been set in prague sans serif, created in 1790 by the Dutch designer Bernard Kopland. The type is Kopland’s attempt at Renaissance-style lettering; what is thought to be an early version was found, gouged and abraded, in the Utrecht attic studio where Kopland worked. Two workmen refitting the house for a young couple discovered the type. One workman pocketed the W and the L, for those were his girlfriend’s initials. The other workman—the gas fitter—phoned the historical society, and this earlier version of prague sans serif now resides, sans W and L, in the historical society’s museum in Utrecht.

In his day, the clean lines of Kopland’s design went largely unappreciated. The type is now prized for its quiet dignity, which imposes order on the chaos of post-modern text. Kopland never visited the city for which he named this type; records show he never left Utrecht. The circumstances surrounding his death by drowning at the age of thirty-eight remain unknown.

No one can pinpoint the exact provenance of universal humanes. The roman type’s easy readability made it popular for handbills early in the seventeenth century, and its use continued through the many mechanical revolutions in typesetting and design over the next three hundred years. Minor alterations to the type were introduced, most notably: in 1780, the punch cutter Jan Ahlman, distracted by the imminent birth of his first grandchild, rushed the production of a set of type and inadvertently truncated the lowercase a’s serif; in 1829, William Quinn, whose eyes were going, enlarged the tittles of the i and j; later that century, Aloysius Jones, a recently freed slave, slanted the counter of the lowercase e; his daughter, Aretha Jones, made her own mark on the design in the early twentieth century by rotating the thinnest parts of the uppercase O from twelve...