Chapter one was a literal timeline of
the evolution of typography. There were a lot of really interesting
points in the evolution of type. By far my favorite little piece in
this chapter was the 1890's Coca-Cola Syrup jug, because the typeface
has not changed a single bit since then. It's incredible to me to
think that a design someone creates can withstand the test of time
the way that type design did. It's so iconic nowadays. More
fascinating to me in a historical sense were the early carvings on
the Egyptian artifacts, tombs, etc. Their written language had to go
beyond markings and characters, it was actual images that doubled as
“type” in a way. It must have been difficult to establish at the
time, as I would think each individual writer or scribe would have
their own touch when drawing the glyphs. There must have been some
degree of variation and therefore might have complicated the
uniformity of the language. They must have done alright, though, to
have a glyph language that is decipherable thousands of years later.
Coming up to the age of hand written
letterforms, text like those of thirteenth century Gothic forms
always blow my mind, to think of someone sitting at a desk for hours
upon hours and only writing a few pages. It goes to show what kind of
treasures written texts of all kinds were a few centuries ago. It's
almost incomprehensible and I think often goes unappreciated. It was
almost like legibility came secondary to art form. Chances are
though, that the old monks tucked away in the monasteries had nothing
but time on their hands when they made copies upon copies of bibles
and other secular texts.
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| Here is a recreation, in color, of the jug I described and is represented in the book. It's practically a jug of moonshine! |
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