CAB@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (Chuck Bigelow) (10/29/88)
I can agree with most of your points, Pierre. There are some particularly hideous varieties of Garamond let loose in the world. Most of them are not based on anything that Garamond ever touched himself (recall that he died in 1561, somewhat before the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter). I personally find the ITC Garamond the most detestable of all the phoney Garamonds, but this is merely a matter of taste. Somewhere there must be a version even more repulsive, but my limited powers of imagination fail when I try to visualize what could be worse. Most, but not all, of the types called Garamond are actually based on designs by Jean Jannon, a French printer who worked first in Paris and later in Sedan (where he printed protestant works for the Calvinist Academy) in the first decades of the 17th century. His types were later acquired (forcibly) by, I believe, Richelieu, in the name of the King, and wound up in the Imprimerie Royale, where they were given the name "caracteres de l'universite". There they remained for centuries, until revived several times, under the misapplied name of Garamond, early in the 20th century. The American Typefounders version by Morris Fuller Benton is probably the best known Garamond revival. Beatrice Warde, writing under the nom de plume of Paul Beaujon, wrote the definitive essay on the history of the Garamond design for the Fleuron, a typographic periodical of the 1920s. She was an excellent writer with plenty of insight and wit, and her work is still good reading today. She fails to mention the ITC Garamond because it was not yet even dreamed of when she wrote. (For recent essays on typeface design, see FINE PRINT ON TYPE, a collection of reviews of typefaces from Fine Print, a journal of the book arts. Includes reviews of Galliard, ITC Zapf Chancery, Century Schoolbook, etc. Fine Print, P.O. Box 3394, San Francisco, CA 94119. Paperback, ISBN 0-9607290-2-x, $19.95.) Sabon, designed by Jan Tschichold, is my choice for the best contemporary Garamond design, even though it is not called Garamond. The so-called Stempel Garamond, named for the foundry that produced it, is also good. There is hardly a decent version of Bembo in phototype, let alone in digital type, except from the Monotype Corporation itself. Bembo was and is a beautiful face in metal type and letterpress printing but there aren't too many TeX drivers for the Monotype casters. Although a wicked sinner in the design of large x-height faces (Lucida's x-height is greater than 50% of the body) I can nevertheless agree that x-height, and hence ascender and descender length, are crucial aspects of a design, and that small x-height types can be just as legible, and sometimes more legible, as well as more beautiful, than big x-height types. The classic book faces that you mention are good examples. I can also agree that the use of a single design for all sizes results in poor quality typography. It is, however, cheaper, so we get what we pay for, except that since the mfgrs. don't offer designs tuned by size, except in exceptional cases, like Adobe's Times Ten, we can't get it even if we were willing to pay. However, none of the classic designs is available in a faithful version in Metafont, to my knowledge, and I have never been able to figure out how to get one of them into Metafont accurately, so I don't have much hope for help from that quarter either. The tools aside, an important question is whether there will be any incentive for designers to tackle this problem and produce beautiful new digital versions of classic faces, not to mention original new digital fonts? A recent ruling by the U.S. Copyright office denies copyrightability for digital fonts. That's right, folks, digital type can't be copyrighted any more (a few fonts were copyrighted before the C.O. got around to this recent decision) either as programs or as data. Do I hear a collective gasp of horror, or is that the whirring of thousands of disk drives in the background? Without copyright protection, few firms will be interested in producing new types, since fonts will be plagiarizable with impunity. But get ready for a flood of rip-offs of the old-stuff. It may not be too bad, after all, Fred Goudy wrote that, "The old fellows stole all of our best ideas." In reaching their decision, the Copyright Office said that they were conscious of the interests of typeface developers. No doubt this is the same way in which a householder armed with a can of RAID is conscious of the interests of cockroaches when endeavoring to exterminate them from the kitchen. It is ironic that computer viruses are copyrightable programs, even though the virus creator would prefer to have the virus copied as often as possible, since its purpose is to cause mischief and harm among the unsuspecting, whereas digital typefaces are not copyrightable, even though they are useful and valuable creations intended for the education, edification and elevation of humanity. (A few years ago I wrote a longer piece on typeface protection which appeared on this list, and also in TUGBOAT, October 1986, and other publications. It is now, obviously, out of date regarding U.S. copyright.) --Chuck