An Essay on Typography
by Eric Gill
excerpted New York Times review by Paul Rand
Feast of St James the Apostle & Brother of St John the Theologian
Anno Domini 2020, April 30, 2020
THIS ADMIRABLE
little book, first published in 1931 in a limited edition, is important less for its erudition about the theory and practice of typography than for the moral support it gives to artists, whose principal concern is the quality of their work; to businessmen, who are chiefly interested in the bottom line; and to printers and publishers, who are more concerned with traditional practices than with wild ideas.
Even though An Essay on Typography
deals with technical difficulties, the history and evolution of letters, the craft of typography, type design and manufacturing, page makeup, color and ink preparation, paper making, book binding, publishing and even orthography, it is written with clarity, humility and a touch of humor. Eric Gill’s writing style moves between a chuckle and a grimace, avoiding a lot of technical jargon and pretentious allusions. And Gill, who was not only a British typographer, but a sculptor, engraver and writer, panders to no one. One wonders how so much could have been packed into such a tiny package - probably enough to have made experts in typography and printing like the Americans Daniel Berkeley Updike and Theodore L. De Vinne marvel.
Gill’s ultimate goal, like that of any serious artist, had less to do with means than with ends - the proper balance between form and content, between man and machine. He cautions the worker not to get too involved with the machine. “It is important that the workman should not have to watch his instrument, that his whole attention should be given to work.” “The mind,” he further asserts, “is the arbiter of letter forms, not the tool or the material.” For those dazzled by the computer, who see the machine as a magic muse, these words are particularly useful.
On more than one occasion he implies that the businessman’s involvement in esthetics is incidental, not intentional. “And the printer whose concern is quality,” he says, “is not a man of business.” Similar expressions – “by men of brains rather than by men of business” and “the history of printing has been the history of commercial exploitation” - sum up Gill’s attitude about industry, even though he owed much of his livelihood to English type founders.
He even advises the publisher where his name should appear in a book, and calls the ordinary title page “a showing off ground . . . an advertisement for the printer and publisher.” The names of printer and publisher, he says, should appear at the end of the book where they logically belong. The design of the title page of the 1931 edition, for example, is a masterpiece of understatement, containing the title, the author’s name and the table of contents in a design so splendid that, even today, it would be considered revolutionary.
[…]
To Gill’s eye, lettering was “as beautiful a thing to see as any sculpture or painted picture.” Yet the relationship between words and spelling, between printed words and speech, he considered irrational, and he suggested that some sort of shorthand system, which he called phonography, be provided as a possible solution. “We need a system in which there is real correspondence between speech . . . the sounds of language and the means of communication.” This had nothing to do with speed. “Think slowly, speak slowly, write slowly” is what he exhorted his readers. […]
*Full review originally appeared as "The Case for the Ampersand" in The New York Times, September 10, 1989, Section 7, Page 22. Available in full online at this New York Times link.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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