POETRY OF INVISIBLE TYPOGRAPHY
One of the introductions to 20th century typography
author: Olivera Batajić
June 2006
translation into English: Ivan Milenković
August 2008
Although born as an American, she spent most of her life in England. She was born in the very beginning of the 20th century as a member of the Becker family. She took the surname Warde from her husband, also known by his close connection to lettering, typography, typeface design – Frederic Warde. Being a woman of “that time”, she dove into the, for a woman, unreachable world of typography under a male pseudonym. She created poetry from hot lead typesetting. Neither a designer nor a typographer, she influenced both fields in the20 th century. But, let us start from the beginning, just like the century itself. From the beginning of the Age of extremes, as Eric Hobsbawm characterized “our century” in his History of the short 20th century . It became extreme typography wise too.
So, our story begins on the 20th of September 1900 in New York, America. That is the date when “the first lady of typography” announced her arrival to the world.
Her mother, May Lamberton Becker, was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune before she met her future husband Gustav Becker. She was advancing quickly, thanks mostly to her great interest in children’s literature, and started to publish the first weekly magazine for children. She wrote critiques and reviews of children’s books and edited anthologies for children herself. All for the purpose of awakening readers fallen asleep – both children and parents.
Her father, Gustav Becker, was a musician. He moved to New York from Texas where he was born in a family of German immigrants. He had his first musical appearance in his fatherland, in Berlin, when he was 28 years old. He knew Brahms and was tutored by Beethoven’s pupils. He composed pieces for orchestra, voice and piano. He invented the “chromatic alphabet”. He ran two piano schools.
Beatrice was the only child of her parents and it was no coincidence that she followed their path. In a way. When she was four, her grandmother, a former teacher, moved into the house of the over-busy family and started with Beatrice’s education. In addition to her grandmother, and due to the choice of a profession, a great influence on her literary education was, off course, her mother. She mentioned little Beatrice quite often in her articles, analyzing and confirming her theses through empirical examples. Beatrice, surrounded by the books, started to read and write fairly early. During growing up under the educational supervision of her grandmother which lasted until she was twelve, her parents’ marriage fell into a crisis and ended somewhere between 1905 and 1911. That was when little Beatrice first enrolled in school, from a specific starting point – as an independent and a very intelligent little girl.
Her first school Horace Mann was in New York . Her college education was based on classical sciences. The school rule was that students enroll at 13, and finish at 18 years. Beatrice started when she was 12 and finished when she was 16 (skipping the first and fifth year). During her education, she was the editor of the school newspaper. Even then she stood out with her writing abilities. She was interested in poetry and in writing theatrical pieces.
Her initial interest in script and calligraphy awoke during her education at Bernard (Columbia University affiliate in New York). She studied English, French, Latin and philosophy as her majors, along with German, history and natural sciences.
In the fall, while at the third year of studies, she meets Frederic Warde, whom she marries on the 30th of December 1922.
Soon after she graduated, Beatrice began to work in the library of the American Type Founders Company (ATF). The library was founded by ATF in 1908 near New York under the leadership of Henry Lewis Bullen, a famous printer and a great admirer of the profession in the time when the graphic industry was not even close to today's over-saturated market. The library specialized in print and typography. It owned one of the most comprehensive collections of typographic books and had many other areas of interest such as running the Museum of Printing , manufacturing typefaces, tools for use in printing and other items needed in graphical work. Beatrice actually ran the library; she was in charge of marketing material, she organized tours for visitors, lectures and exhibitions. Her approach to everything was different, non-traditional, and she was noticed for it.
During one of Stanley Morison’s visits to Boston in 1924 she met him, to the mutual delight. It was probably her who was the most responsible that afterwards Stanley Morison called Frederic Warde to work in the Monotype Corporation. Beatrice sacrificed her career and went to England with her husband. Nevertheless she continued her cooperation with the library, through Henry Lewis Bullen, and continued her missionary work in the field of typography and printing.
While in London, Beatrice gradually got to know the professional environment while writing research papers. To make it easier for herself to get published and because of the conservative surrounding, she started to write under the name Paul Beaujon (a name she supposedly took so she wouldn't get confused with her husband’s name, but on several occasions she mentions she took the male pseudonym to more easily open the doors to Typography). So, after a few months, she published an article on calligraphy. That same year she wrote a few more research articles, one of them being a very significant text on Fournier and French 18th century typography, and also the famous article on Garamond .
Soon the Wardes’ marriage descended into a crisis. Namely, the constant company of three (Stanley, Beatrice and Frederic) was growing unstable. Beatrice, inclined more towards Morison sensibility and ideas wise, left Frederic. After the divorce (November 1926), she got into a great financial trouble. She leaves for a while to America. She loans money from her mother and begs Stanley Morison to let her write part-time for the Monotype Recorder or even to let her be an editor, so she becomes his assistant. It was a successful move. Beatrice influences the conservative magazine to change its design, which eventually after the positive reactions promotes her to a position of “rédacteur en chef” in the 1927-1928 time frame. That gave her a good position and enough breathing space to release her research work and texts on various subjects. Her most famous article dedicated to Garamond was published in 1926 in The Fleuron. The discovery was made quite by the chance, even though while she was still working in the ATF library, Mr. Bullen as some sort of a prophet announced the possibility of that discovery. She was doing work-related research in the city Museum when she spotted a text laid out in Garamond letters on the front page, but attributed to a certain Jean Jannon. The article in The Fleuron which she signed by her pseudonym was titled “The ‘Garamond’ Types: Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Source Considered”. That theoretical text is regarded as one of the most important typographical researches done in the 20th century. In it, she deals with proving that most of the contemporary fonts which were based on the Garamond type as a direct model are actually based on a type from the early 17th century that was modeled by Jean Jannon. It is presumed that Stanley Morison and H.L Bullen were involved in the whole story of proving the type origin. She was also helped with her research by Frederic Warde who stayed in Paris then (though there is no mention of him). This is how the article of large volume and content was written, therefore Beatrice, in light of her great success and thorough knowledge of the field, was recommended (1929) for the PR manager of the Monotype corporation. However, she still blindly followed Stanley Morison. She considered it her mission to “transmit” his ideas. No surprise there. He helped her in her most difficult moments and in a way defined the course of her career. Although she was much more progressive, modern and inventive than him. In addition to editing the magazine, she designed some of the commercial pages (those that advertised and presented Monotype typefaces), and she did a large number of the magazine’s front-pages.
Beatrice considered Monotype advertising as an education of the amateurs, refinement of the experts and an inspiration to the authors. She regarded her printer’s job as an artist’s job. In a word – divine. That’s how she published her famous leaflet which she wrote whilst making a presentation for Eric Gill’s Perpetua face, which later in a form of a poster decorated print offices and enlightened printers in England and beyond. Even today, cast in bronze, it stands in the hallways of America’s National Printing House in Washington. During her work in Monotype, Eric Gill’s typefaces Gill Sans and Perpetua came to life, [1] Monotype’s machine technology was presented, typography awareness was developed to a poetical and sophisticated dimension. The strongest expression of such ideas is surely her first lecture, and the essay that followed – The Crystal Goblet, which is one of the most quoted texts on typography ever. Also, words from that essay became quite known to generations of Monotype users and designers because they were used as samples to test types.
Beatrice delivered a lecture titled “Printing should be invisible” to the British typographer association in St. Bride's institute in London (7th of October, 1928). Soon the lecture was published in one printing bulletin (The British & Colonial Printer & Stationer). It was republished on several occasions between 1932 and 1937 under its full title: “The Crystal Goblet, or printing should be invisible”, and in 1955 Beatrice published a collection of essays titled: “The Crystal Goblet: 16 essays on typography”. In the introduction of the book, she expresses her grief because the mysterious Paul Beaujon retired from the scene and relinquished his place to Mrs. Warde. None of the essays signed by this pseudonym found its place in the book. There were collected texts originating in discussions with many famous masters of typography of that time, as well as in experiences of working with typefaces. It specially mentions Bruce Rogers, T.M. Cleland and Stanley Morison for whom it says that they managed to, through everyday casual talks, elevate her to a place from where she could clearly see the boundary that divides the vast space between the empire called Letter and the other one – called Art. Commenting on the most famous essay from this book, Shelley Gruendler writes that the power of this essay lays foremost in its approachable explanation and not in its theoretical foundation. In all of her writings, she fought for a clear and readable typography:
“In some industries it is possible to make a thing that looks good but works clumsily, like a handsome teapot that balances badly as you lift it. But that is not the case in typography. You ‘use’ print by looking at it. Designing print means making it look the way it ought to look, in order first to attract or appetize the reader’s eye in the split second before he begins to read, and then either to keep him reading or to help him pick out the part he might want or need to read.”Very harsh in her critiques, she regarded her opinion to be the only truth. She attacked and did not leave space to be attacked.
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“Typography must be clear and good in order to communicate – but that's as far as it goes. The reason why I am interested in typography is because it helps people to communicate with the clarity which an idea deserves. And the reason why I have lost interest in Avant-Garde typography is because I find it too introspective, too preoccupied with making a picture on the page, instead of being concerned with bringing the idea through the clearly polished window of typography into the mind of the reader.”
In her famous essay “The Crystal Goblet”, Beatrice mentions an anecdote about how she asked an artist what he thought about a certain problem, and he responded that the artist doesn't think but feel . That same day she visited one of her friends, a designer, to whom she quoted the response of the former, and to which he replied that he thinks he doesn’t feel so good today. Of course, she was on the side of the “thinking man” and thought his work was much better than the one of the “feeling man”. She thought of the “feeling man” as of a good painter which wasn’t a privilege of the “thinking man” – of whom she thought as of a good designer. Sounds cruel, doesn't it?
She drew attention with her lectures because she was a good, skilful speaker. It was then when she acquired her first followers, the so called followers of classic typography. Amongst them, the most famous was Eric Gill. The two of them were very close friends until the end of the 20s. She frequently modeled for his drawings, the most famous of them being the printers mark for the publishing house Cassell from 1929.
In 1931 she published a very interesting book in a form of a guide, “An American in London” for LNRE railways, titled “Enjoying England: A book about an enchanted Island”.
London suffered greatly during the war, but that as it turned out, inspired Beatrice for new progress and new ideas. One part of the Monotype buildings was bombarded in 1941 and the other was transformed into an ammunition factory. Thus Warde turned away from typography inclining more towards literature; some of her war-time books are even more radical and expressive of her attitude than the ones about typography. She published the book “Bombed but Unbeaten” which was a collection of her personal war-time texts, including letters to her mother in America , as well as some other personal transcripts. She regarded such an approach more sincere than some informal communication to the unknown reader (for the purpose of informing). An important project in which several people were involved was “Books Across the Sea”. It was an association that exchanged books between America and England , for the purpose of improving cultural and literary understanding. The ambassador was T.S. Elliot. Even today some of those books can be found in the Columbia University library, but the British ones are mostly gone. For Beatrice, the most important book from that period was “The Token Freedom”. In it were the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Ruskin and Abraham Lincoln. It was handed out to children across America . Beatrice's mother May also took part in these actions. She edited some of the books, and also published one titled “The youth responds – I can” which was a collection of stories about enduring and surviving the war-time years. Beatrice wrote a short foreword for it, titled “The Last Penny”, in which she wrote about the nobleness of British children during the war. It was in the form of a letter and was once printed as such in the New York Herald Tribune.
The war ended. Many changes happened in the world as well as in typography. Beatrice also changed. Monotype’s machines became less used, including their types. Beatrice, guided by her experiences from the war, concentrated on typographical education. She began delivering lectures across the country in all the schools that had anything to do with this field – printing schools, design schools and even art schools. Nonetheless, she continued her collaboration with Monotype as she was full of ideas. She printed her lectures as brochures, to make every word accessible to laymen and professionals alike. She thought of the typographic process as of something immensely important. Those who could read had to have awareness of typography and also be grateful for such a discovery (movable type) that moved the world of literacy. So she unselfishly shared her treasure with others and was a true missionary – an evangelist of good typography.
In September of 1960 she retired and left Monotype, but continued to deliver lectures and to travel, although not as much as before. Her condition, mental and physical, deteriorated after the death of Stanley Morison (11th of October, 1967). Destroyed by depression she gave up and passed away on the 14 th of September 1969 in the quietness of her own home. She was buried in Epsom, London. John Dreyfus, British typographer and historian, on commemoration read the words from the first epistle from St. Paul to Timothy:
6:17. Charge the rich of this world not to be high-minded nor to trust in the uncertainty of riches, but in the living God (who giveth us abundantly all things to enjoy)
6:18. To do good, to be rich in good work, to give easily, to communicate to others. [2]
“Work has been a game all my life. It’s been more fun than I could possibly tell you. It has been like being in love…– she said in one of her last lectures.
ADDENDUM
Frederic Warde
Stanley Morison
Part of “The Crystal Goblet” by Beatrice Warde
TEXTS RELATED TO THE TOPIC
Typographic jangle
author: Olivera Batajić
Typography at the beginning of 20th century cannot be contemplated separately from painting, poetry, literature, architecture, music, and eventually photography and film as well. More precisely, along with technology development and emergence of new art forms, the boundaries of visual conceiving were also moved . [...]
On the choice of typeface
author: Beatrice Warde
The legibility of a typeface has an exact parallel in the audibility of a human voice. A lecturer must make every word audible and distinct. [...]
Footnotes:
[1] Eric Gill made those types for manual composition, and then they were remade for machine composition [back]
[2] http://www.ewtn.com/library/scriptur/1tim.txt [back]