Blue Pencil no. 56—Creative Typography

Creative Type: A Sourcebook of Classic and Contemporary Letterforms by Alston Purvis, Cees de Jong, and Friedrich Friedl (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005)

This is not a full Blue Pencil dissection. It is based solely on the portions of Creative Type available as a Google Books preview online. The preview includes the front cover, pp. 268, 276, 279–280, 282–291, 294–295, 297, 299–304, 306–310, 313–320, 322–323, 326–327, 329–333, 335, 338, 340, 342–345, 347, 349–351, 353–355, 357–359, 362–364, 366, 369–371, 373, 375–380, 382–383, 386–387, 399–400, and the back cover. There are enough mistakes within these few pages to warrant a Blue Pencil dissection. I would be grateful if readers bring any other problems in the book to my attention since I am unlikely to purchase a copy.

p. 307—”Adobe’s first original fonts were [Sumner] Stone’s Stone family typefaces, cut in a total of 18 weights.”
• ITC Stone, ITC Stone Sans, and ITC Stone Informal were all developed by Sumner Stone during his time at Adobe, but they were released by International Typeface Corporation since Adobe had no program for original typefaces in 1987. The first Adobe Originals were released in 1989.

p. 315—”He [Kris Holmes] studied from 1968 to 1971 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he was taught calligraphy by Lloyd Reynolds and Robert Paladino [sic]. In 1975, he attended the Martha Graham School and the Alwin Nikolai School in New York (modern dance). He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976, where he was taught lettering by Ephraim E. Benguiatm [sic], and at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York in 1979, where he was taught calligraphy and type design by Hermann Zapf. Holmes’s calligraphic and lettering work has been printed in numerous magazines. In 1976, he and Charles Bigelow founded the company Bigelow & Holmes.”
• Kris Holmes is a woman. She did not matriculate at Reed College.
• “Robert Paladino” should be “Robert Palladino”
• “Ephraim E. Benguiatm” should be “Ed Benguiat” who, although his given first name was Ephraim, was widely known as Ed.

p. 326 and p. 327—”Akzidenz Grotesk, 1969 / Günter Gerhard Lange”; “Helvetica, 1957 / Max Miedinger”; “Futura, 1932 / Paul Renner”; “GillSans, 1928–1930 / Eric Gill”; “Times New Roman, 1832 / Stanley Morison”; “Bodoni, 1790 / Giambattista Bodoni”; “Baskerville, 1754 / John Baskerville”; “Caslon, 1725 / William Caslon”; “Stempel Garamond, 1543 / Claude Garamond”
• The date and designer of Akzidenz Grotesk is wrong (see the note re: p. 330 below).
• Max Miedinger (with significant input from Eduard Hoffmann) designed Neue Haas Grotesk in 1957. The typeface was renamed Helvetica in 1960. (See Helvetica Forever: Story of a Typeface by edited by Lars Müller and Victor Malsy [Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2008].)
• Futura was first released in 1927 (see the note for p. 342 below).
• “GillSans” should be “Gill Sans”
• Times New Roman was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent for the use of The Times newspaper in 1931. It was commercially released in 1932.
• The date 1790 is often assigned to Giambattista Bodoni’s types, but I have no idea why. His first mature neoclassical typefaces appeared earlier than that. (See Serie di maiuscole e caratteri cancellereschi [Parma: 1788] and “Bodoni and his roman and italic types” by James Clough.)
• John Baskerville’s first type specimen was 1754, but the first use of his types (cut by John Handy) was in a 1757 edition of Virgil.
• The date of 1725 is frequently assigned to William Caslon’s types, though his first type specimen did not appear until 1728.
• Stempel Garamond was issued in 1925. The date of 1543 makes no sense for it or for any specific typefaces cut by Claude Garamont (see the note for p. 380 below).

p. 330—”Akzidenz Grotesk – Günter Gerhard Lange – 1969″
• “Akzidenz Grotesk” was not designed by Lange. He designed AG Book (1969–1973), AG Old Face (1984), AG Schoolbook (1983), and AG Royal (2012). Presumably the authors of Creative Type are referring to the first members of the AG Book family, though AG Old Face is considered to be more faithful to the original Akzidenz Grotesk.

p. 330—”Two companies presented Akzidenz Grotesk in January 1899 in an advertisement in the German book and lithographic press; one was Berthold, the other Bauer & Co. in Stuttgart.”
• The first member of the Akzidenz Grotesk family was released in 1898 by H. Berthold. Bauer & Co. was a subsidiary of H. Berthold. For the newest information on the history of Akzidenz Grotesk see several blog posts by Dan Reynolds which are all listed in “Footnotes C: Retracing the origins of Akzidenz-Grotesk”.

p. 342—”Futura – Paul Renner – 1932″
• The first members of the Futura family were released in 1927. I have no idea where the 1932 date comes from. (See Futura: The Typeface by Petra Eisele, Annette Ludwig, and Isabel Naegele [London: Laurence King, 2017].)

p. 342—”In 1925, Jan Tschichold published a special edition of Typographische Mitteilungen entitled ‘Elementary Typography’, in which he formulated his efforts to create a new typography: ‘Of the typefaces available, Grotesque or Black face [sic] are the nearest to what the New Typography needs, because they are simple in design and easy to read.…'”
• “Black face” should be “Block face”. This unfortunate typographic mistake where an o was inadvertently replaced by an a was made possible by the use of Futura was the text.

p. 349—”GillSans”
• “GillSans” should be “Gill Sans”

p. 354—”Times New Roman – Stanley Morison – 1932″
• The portrait is of William Morris not Stanley Morison

p. 355—”Stanley Ignatius Arthur Morison (1889–1967) became typographic advisor to Monotype in 1923, where he was in charge of designing typeface families based on historical models.”
• It is true that Morison oversaw the design of typefaces based on historical models, but this sentence implies that is why he was hired which is not the case. The program of historical revivals was his idea. (See A Tally of Types by Stanley Morison [Cambridge: privately printed, 1953].)

p. 366—”Logotype for Le Musée d’Orsay, Paris, by Bruno Monguzzi and Jean Widmer, 1990.”
• The M|’O logotype (designed in 1984) was drawn by hand, influenced by the types of Firmin Didot. The rest of the type in the image (a postage stamp?) is Walbaum.

p. 369—”John Baskerville began cutting and casting his own typefaces in 1754 and was influenced by the lettering of stonemasons, as were other English type designers who later went on to produce he typefaces we regard as typically English today: Clarendons, Grotesques and Egyptians.”
• John Handy cut Baskerville’s types. There is no influence of English stonemasons on his types or on Clarendons, Grotesques, or Egyptians.

p. 369—”His [Baskerville’s] most famous publication is Juvenalis in 1761.”
• This is a surprising statement since Baskerville’s edition of Virgil’s Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis (1757) is usually accorded that honor.

p. 369—”Baskerville invented coated paper when he was working as a printer for the University of Cambridge.”
• Baskerville, in collaboration with the papermaker James Whatman invented wove paper. Coated paper was invented in c.1886 by S.D. Warren.

p. 375—”William Bowyen” should be “William Bowyer”
p. 375—”…he [William Caslon] published his first and extensive catalogue for his foundry in 1734…”
• Caslon’s 1734 type specimen was a broadside sheet and not a catalogue.

p. 379—”‘Caslon versus Baskerville’, a Linotype Caslon advertisement, c. 1900.”
• The date of c.1900 is wrong. Linotype Baskerville was cut in 1926 under the direction of George W. Jones for Linotype & Machinery in England. The first Linotype Caslon was cut c.1903; Caslon Old Face, a more historically accurate design, was cut by Mergenthaler Linotype in 1923; and Caslon No. 2 was cut by Mergenthaler Linotype in 1936 as a copy of Monotype’s Caslon No. 37. (See American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century by Mac McGrew [New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Books, 1993], pp. 27 and 67.)

p. 380—”Stempel Garamond – Claude Garamond – 1543″
• Stempel Garamond (1925) (shown on pp. 382–383) was based on the types attributed to Claude Garamont shown as part of the Egenolff-Berner type specimen sheet (1592). None of them were cut in 1543 according to The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance by Hendrik D.L. Vervliet (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008), volume 1. The 1543 date appears to be a mistranscription of the date on the title page shown on p. 380: L’historie de Thvcydide… “Imprimé a Paris par Pierre Gaultier pour Iehan Barbé & Claude Garamont 1545”.