Paul Renner and Futura: The Effects of Culture, Technology, and Social Continuity On the Design of Type for Printing

[quadibloc]

Charles Leonard:
fonts like Times Roman disguise their modernist premise through appropriation of authority accrued to historic models. Further, such appropriation has become such a standard feature of 20th century typefounding that its implications frequently go unnoticed. Worse, appropriation of obvious historical authority obscures the true nature of fonts that, like Futura, have their own clearly discernable historical antecedants but access them in ways not in agreement with the "official party line."

(Annoyed John Cleese voice:) Appropriation of historical authority?

Wouldn't it be enough to say that humanist miniscule looked nice, and people were used to it, and it was readable, and so when Nicholas Jenson started from that, but made something more harmonious with the Roman capitals than rotunda, it looked nice, and people liked it - and so, even today, while type designers do try to express their own originality and creativity too, when they're making a design intended for practical use, they make one that's similar to what people already like and are used to.

With respect to your thesis rather than your posting, although the specifically German influence on Futura does generally go unmentioned in histories of printing types, in histories of typography in general (that is, the use of types as well as their design) the Weimar Republic and Bauhaus and all that figure rather prominently. After all, the other major geometric sans-serif is Kabel.

Thus, rather than looking for complicated reasons, I suspect that historians of printing types simply go with Italian: Jenson; French: Garamond; Dutch: Elzevir; English: Caslon... and then, what with Didot being French, and Bodoni being Italian, they just throw up their hands and proclaim that type design became international from then on.

On the other hand, as I progress further into your thesis, I find it eminently sensible to suspect that Paul Renner's reason for not leaving Germany was because of his age - and that any left-wing politics associated with the Weimar period that may have influenced the design of Futura would have been an embarrassment to be passed over in silence as Futura graced advertising copy in post-war America.

I just wouldn't have felt it necessary to slag Times Roman for paying homage to Caslon. Kowtowing to an authoritarian political model? Given that British history, despite the unpleasantness of the Industrial Revolution, went as well as it did because nonsense like the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon or Mussolini happened over there rather than in Britain, many people in Britain quite legitimately felt there was something to be said for respecting authority.

In short, I think your problem is that you're the sort of person that prefers other kinds of novels to The Lord of the Rings.