Companion, Palatino, and Tampa Review

When Tampa Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with Tampa Review 50, composed for the first time in Frederic W. Goudy’s privately commissioned Companion Old Style type—we were consciously seeking to express our unique identity. The Tampa Book Arts Studio, our letterpress and fine printing laboratory, had just acquired the only surviving matrices for casting Companion Old Style, a private typeface commissioned in 1927 for exclusive use by the Woman’s Home Companion, one of the nation’s premier magazines at the time, with a circulation approaching four million. We wanted to show off our rare, exclusive typeface. And we wanted our “Number 50” to look special in observance of our fifty years of publishing. We even included a handprinted letterpress card, set by hand in metal Companion types we had cast from the long-lost matrices, proclaiming Tampa Review to be your long-term literary companion.

Companion was designed by Goudy as a display type, and he described it as having “greater consistent original features than any other face I have ever made.” It was used in Woman’s Home Companion for titles, headings, and captions—never for text. But when digital type designer Steve Matteson, Type Director of Monotype Imaging, showed us his new digital rendering of Companion, we could not resist a complete commitment.

Tampa Review 50, published in 2015, was set entirely in Companion, both text and display. And it proved to be quite readable, though one characteristic of its design that worked well for titles—its unusually long ascenders and descenders—caused problems when set into lines of text. As seen in the examples below, the ascenders and descenders tended to meet.

We made adjustments starting in TR 51/52, increasing the leading (the white space between lines), and by the time we reached TR 53, we had finessed the line spacing and were learning more about the strengths and weaknesses of Companion as a text face. Adding leading created the necessary space between lines, but it also increased the overall white space on an already “light” page, due to the delicate serifs and fine strokes of Companion. While readable in smaller sizes, the overall impact of a full page of type was lighter, lacier, and more “gray” than we wanted—the “color” of a full page seemed not quite as weighty and solid as we felt the literary texts deserved.

There were also some significant practical disadvantages: the need for increased leading meant that fewer lines would fit on a page, which meant having to add extra pages (and costs) to each issue. Also, a long-term commitment to Companion for setting texts meant we would lose (and miss) the ability to use a variety of useful type weights—boldface and semibold in both roman and italic—which are often useful in designing an issue and meeting requirements writers placed upon texts.

In short, we found ourselves thinking fondly of the font that Tampa Review had first selected—Palatino, designed by Hermann Zapf. Released in 1948, and, like Companion, originally designed for metal type, Palatino bridged the transition from hot type to digital. Zapf himself was fully involved in creating the original foundry type and remained involved with its later release for digital typesetting.

Both Zapf and Goudy were looking back with reverence at the warmth of the humanist style of letter forms, both designers preserving the thick-and-thin variations in line weight made by the pen nib in the hand of the calligrapher from the pre-printing age. These two types share open counters, wide bowls, a bracketed but nearly-hairline serif, and a readability on the page.

With Tampa Review 54, we think we have found the right combination of our original text font, Palatino, accompanied by our unique Companion Old Style, for titles and display as it was originally employed in Companion magazine. Using both typefaces we hope will be a statement of identity that connects with our own Tampa Review design history, as well as with the historic calligraphic, letterpress, and literary traditions expressed by two brilliant type designers. At the same time we reach forward with digital tools as well as...