An Essay on Typography

Gill’s approach to the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution may give us some ideas about how to curb the flux of the information age

Eric Gill's An Essay on Typography. The first edition was written in 1931.

This summer has been filled with some really great reading. About two weeks ago I finished Eric Gill’s, An essay on Typography. This lovely (and quick!) read was written in 1931.

Eric Gill is a very opinionated man, and throughout the book, he speaks much about type, printing, punch-cutting, paper, ink and more as it related to the industrial revolution. I was fascinated with how his concerns and opinions about the changing world relate to our changing world. Today, we are facing globalization, advances in technology, offshoring/outsourcing and so on. Gill’s essay is right in line with some of the challenges that today’s creative professional face.

“If you are going to employ men to build a wall, and if those men are to be treated simply as tools, it is imbecility to make such a design for your wall as depends upon your having masons who are artist.” p. 8

I might relate this to today by saying, “If you are going to outsource your website design to a handful of right-brained coders (now I know that there are many left-brained coders, I am not talking about you), it is imbecility to make such a brief for your website as depends upon your having coders who are artist.”

Eric Gill goes on, in his chapter on lettering, to outline some core principles in understanding what typography is and how it ought to be used. Principles like readability, aesthetic, letters are not pictures but signs for sounds, abstract forms. One thing I love in this chapter is how he relates that blackletter was not a classification to those in the gothic world, their letters were simply letters. Italic was not italic to scribes in Italy, but they were rather just letters.

An example of the diagrams that are in this book.

Another gem of knowledge is the brief chapter on punch-cutting, the process by which metal type was cut at the time. He compares the hand done process, which is vertically integrated by one man, i.e. the type is designed and cut into steel by the same man. In the machine method of punch-cutting, a designer draws the letters about two inches high. Then a draughtsman reflects the images through a lens and enlarges each form to about 12 inches high. This is then refined as seen fit by the draughtsman’s supervisor. The image is placed under a pantograph and the image is etched into a thin layer of wax laid on a metal bed. Then another removes the unwanted wax and places the wax letter in relief in an electric bath, coating it with copper. The wax is melted out and you are left with a “positive” pattern which is placed into a new pantograph where it is traced at all the needed sizes. The type is then cast. This process makes for a much faster cutting of type than can be done by hand. Gill rambles (sarcastically) about how unlimited this process is. He tells that even if all those employed by the industrial punch-cutting process were ‘in full intellectual sympathy with the designer,’ (which is very far from the case) there is still a hinderance to accuracy. He talks of ‘tame’ workers who are overseen by those interested in business, not art.

Eric Gill includes some really neat examples of type.

This elitist perspective carries throughout the book. He champions handmade inks and papers (something I am dying to figure out how to do), hand printing and hand binding. He argues that a machine so complicated that the workers are watching the machine, rather than the printing, and one that takes 18 men to operate and 800 men to build, will never be as sensitive as the hand-done process.

This book gives tremendous context to the history of graphic design and typography in the Industrial Revolution. Being such a quick read, I can’t think of a good reason why any designer shouldn’t read Eric Gill’s book.