Æthelwold Etc: E, G, and U

The first 4 pages of the color diary

May 21
When I published Mediæval in Padua last year I was pretty thrilled with myself for having printed a book that had 8 colors in it. Now, only half way through the 6th of 26 letters in Æthelwold Etc. I have used 34 colors (the upper right color on the lower right sheet is opaque white). Yesterday alone I used 14 different colors to proof the E, G and U and I have the 6 color C waiting in the wings.¶I printed the first three plates of the G today, two of which are in nearly identical shades of copper. I let the ink sit in a loose packet for a week to stiffen up and the half tones came off with almost no ink gain.


The finished G


Proofs of the U (for Utopiate), E (for Euclid), and G (for Golden) and drawings in various states on my table

May 20
I am currently proofing the Æthelwold E, G and U. The U is particularly unusual because I am trying to precipitate a mild chromatic nausea without being visually offensive. Inspired by a passage from Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater in which de Quincey first acquires opium, the U is meant to evoke Victorian signage like that which would have been used on the druggist's shop where he made his fateful purchase. The shading in the U is the actual text set in my sans serif rendition of Thomas More's Utopian alphabet.


Proof state of the U for Utopiate

Æthelwold Etc. H & J

Playing with Fire

I now have 12 additional letters from Æthelwold ready, or near ready, for proofing. My current plan is to get as much drawing and file preparation done as possible before heading to Los Angeles on Friday. I will then start proofing on the following Tuesday or Wednesday. Below are some pictures of the "drawing" in process for the border of the P (P is for Prometheus).

Æthelwold Etc. Utopiate

Initial Sketch for UTOPIATE

I am currently consumed by sketching, ordering, re-ordering, and re-assigning ideas, shapes, forms from one composition to another as the remaining 23 letters of Æthelwold come in to focus. I am reticent to show sketches of partial ideas but thought I'd show an early rendition of UTOPIATE from the U composition. The composition itself uses text from De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, set in my sans serif rendition of Thomas More's Utopian alphabet, as shading for a dimensional letter form. ¶As the remaining compositions in the book come together I have been led in many unexpected directions for which the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have been invaluable. The Met's collection of hair ornaments form the Biwat people of New Guinea, 5th century Byzantine weavings, and 16th century initial letters of Girolamo dai Libri have all presented new vantage points from which to begin or complete letters. Additionally, I have now been able to work the writing of Keats, Byron, and my beloved Coleridge in, as well as to draw a composition based on the fabulously painterly pavement designs of the Duomo in Sienna. It's all terribly exciting and exhausting.

Saucy Romans take the field

On Thursday I printed the first two pages of the Pervigilium Veneris (one each of Latin and English) in my new Cancellaresca Milanese type. Printing a bilingual text presents many challenges to the typographer, one of the most difficult of which is whether to pursue a feeling of typographic equanimity or to emphasize the differences between the two texts. In the case of the PV, the solution to this problem was aided by Bruce Whiteman's approach to the translation. Rather than producing a symmetrical syllabic rendering of the Latin, Bruce (thankfully) chose to set the English to his own music. The resulting translation is nearly twice as many lines as the original Latin. One of the pitfalls of using a Cancellaresca Corsiva type (like my Milanese) is that it tends to visually break up when freighted with too much white space. The ascenders and descenders need to be close to their own kind or they hang on the page like forlorn tendrils, disconnected and exposed. If I were to set both the Latin and the English in upper and lower case, the Latin would not hold its own on the page but be subsummed by the empty chasms separating stanzas. As a solution I chose to set the Latin in all caps and the English in upper and lower case. The Latin stakes out its territory with a horizontal epigraphic presence while the English is allowed to flow in a more vertical thread.

Cancelleresca Milanese in progress

Cancelleresca Milanese Set-Width Drawing Board

In an effort to create a more faithful rendition of Castiglioni's italic I am designing the type so that each letter has a pre-determined set width, just as it would have been designed in metal. By minimizing the number of kerning pairs the hope is to maintain the underlying rhythm of the original. The most typical – and legitimate – complaint about digital typography is that it is possessed of a blasé uniformity, an uninspiring sameness of color, angle, kerning, and alignment. Conversely, most efforts at scribal or (dreadful) hand-written typographic forms present a mere parody of rhythm, usually at the cost of legibility, grace, and flow. With this in mind, the Cancelleresca Milanese type is a study in the middle ground, an attempt to be simultaneously mindful of typographic necessity and calligraphic improvisation. ¶And then the problems begin. I am now on the third drafting of the type. When I proofed the first draft I was struck with fear at what I saw: more Roycrofter than Renaissance, more Goudy than good. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the first cutting of the original – the 1541 version that I am using as my model – is actually only a lowercase font that was paired with a pre-existing set of capitals. The capitals, in turn, are German rather than Italian humanist forms. It is fascinating that the printer chose to set a book about trans-and cisalpine inscriptions using a combination of trans- and cisalpine types. Fascinating and frustrating. The first casualty was the R, a letter that stands out as being so unique in the original, a relative of the early Humanist capitals of Donatello [see below]. It was one of the letters that first drew me to the face, but when I printed it I couldn't stop thinking of the New Yorker font or – I was crushed – a Roycrofter book. I can't abide that. Then the q presented a problem. The original used by Castiglioni was an upside down b with the tail, as was the fashion at the time, trailing down & to the left. To our eyes this is an impedement to the easy progression of the narrative, more of an affectation than anything else, and so it must go. As it stands now I am happy with the font but I also understand that it is an interpretation, a digital cousin of the original type.

Æthelwold Etc: Week Five, or Saucy Romans

Italic used by Giovanni Antonio Castiglioni in Milan, 1541

First sample arrangement after original

First sample setting of Capitals

Most of this past week was devoted to my talk at the Type Directors Club on Thursday and printing an invitation for my godson Coltrane's nursery school. With those tasks complete I have started trial settings of the Latin text of Pervigilium Veneris in 12 didot Romulus. For Bruce Whiteman's translation I have begun drawing a rendition of the upright Italic used by Giovanni Antonio Castiglioni from 1541. [original shown above] This is also the font that I will be using for the notes in Æthelwold Etc.