FACTORALY - E11 TYPE AND PRINTING

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Bruce's background in Art and Advertising means he's a proper type nerd. Simon sits back and takes it all in. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome! Welcome! Hello, one and all. How are you all today? Oh good, I'm glad to hear it. That's's good we need to make an interactive podcast here actually what you could do do you remember no you won't remember because it was before you were born when um they started broadcasting football on the radio the radio the radio times published a grid of the pitch okay and the commentators would say and he's passed the ball to Davies in D7, and Davies in D7 is this. Oh, my goodness. Oh, that must have been such a difficult thing to follow at speed.

Yeah. The ball just floated through D7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. There we go. So we're off to a good start. We're waffling already. So anyone who has accidentally just started listening to this and are wondering what on earth is going on, join the club. Yes.

We have no idea. Tell you what, let's tell you who we are. Who are we, Bruce? We're a couple of voiceovers. Bruce Fielding. And Simon Wells. And this is another episode of Fact Orally. What is Fact Orally?

Well, every week we talk about some facts. Orally. It's a great name for it then. It's not bad, isally. It's a great name for it then. It's not bad, is it? It's not bad. We pick a different subject each week, from cucumbers to dogs to anything really, and we just sit here for a little while and chat about it, and we sort of see what research each of us has done during the week.

Sometimes we amaze each other with things that the other person hadn't researched. Sometimes we just... Sometimes we just know things. Yeah, we do have something of a repository of knowledge. We are nerds. Let's be honest. We have a collection of anoraks somewhere. They're all grey. Yes, but each one is different. A different shade of grey. Let's not go there. No, that's another episode. So Bruce, what interesting topic are we going to chat about this week? Well, this is one of my favourite subjects. This is typography and printing. Very good. Can I just say at the very, very beginning?

Go on. I'm going to get this off my chest because I will shout at anybody who gets this wrong. A typeface is the actual face like um badoni or times or helvetica right a font is what you do with the face so that's whether it's bold or italic or which what point size it is or anything like that so is it if you imagine if you imagine the typeface is the body and the font is the clothes oh nice okay so that So that's an easy way to think about it. So when you're talking about a typeface you're talking about the big picture, the actual thing itself whereas the font is very much how you treat it. So when we're all on our computers

there's a little drop down menu that says font. Yes. From which you can pick things like Arial Helvetica times New Roman. So that's incorrect, is it? Yep. They actually mean typeface? Yes. Well, there we go. I've learned something already. We're only a couple of minutes in. I tend to shout at the radio, at people in general, if they use font when they mean typeface. Right, okay. I wonder who first made that error.

Whoever it was, it was quite substantial because that's what I automatically think a font is. It's the name of the typeface. Yes, no, no. The name of the typeface is the name of the typeface. Right, okay, fine. So why is it called typeface? Oh, that's a good question. Do you know? I don't know. I never really thought to look that up. Do you know?

I do. I looked it up. Type comes from the 15th century, is the first time we sort of see the word type used in this context. And it's from the old Latin word typus, which means an impression or a symbol or an emblem or an engraving so it's something that is printed well printed engraved whatever so that is is where we get typed from and i guess the type face it's the face of it isn't it it's the front of the thing that we're using to type with um whilst we're on that the origin of font as well it comes from an old french French word, fonte, F-O-N-T-E, which means to melt and to cast into a particular shape.

Which is why companies that own typefaces are called foundries. Oh, I can feel it already. There are going to be so many nuggets of information this week yes and they're called foundries because they were actually foundries they they used to set type in one single solid piece of lead that was actually with raised bits that you could then print so you've you've mentioned already that this is this is your episode this is this is the thing that you're passionate about how did you become passionate about it what what is there in your past that makes you so intrigued by this? It was battered into me over four years of art school. And it was one of the bits of art school that I really liked. And actually, when I was at art school, we had printing machines. We actually

learned how to set type, how to set individual pieces of letter on a thing called a galley, which you then put into a movable type frame. And then you would use that to print. So all the letters were backwards and upside down. Yes, of course. Because when they're placed onto the paper, it comes out the other way around. So they're all backwards. So you had to learn what they looked like upside down and backwards. Oh my goodness. There was like two, I mean, you may have seen them on antiques shows and things like that there's like a a drawer a tray that had lots and lots of tiny little um cubby holes and the the letter each letter had its own little cubby hole and these

all fitted into a case so um all the all the smaller letters were at the bottom half of the case which is easier to access and all the the letters you didn the bottom half of the case. Which is easier to access. And all the letters you didn't use quite as often, which was the capital letters, were all in the top, which is why you get lowercase and uppercase. Stop it. That's brilliant. Yeah. covered in ink. Basically, you have to wipe this printing ink, which is very sticky, off the letters and clean them up and then put each individual letter back into its cubbyhole and make sure that you've got it in the right cubbyhole because otherwise the next person

coming along will pick a letter out of that cubbyhole, assuming that it's a Q or something, and it turns out to be a P. I think this may be entirely apocryphal, but I think that's the origin of the phrase to mind your P's and Q's. It is. Sort of talking about etiquette and watching the finer detail, because P and Q are next to each other in the case, and backwards, they look very similar to each other. So it would be easy to confuse them and pick out the wrong ones. So mind your Ps and Qs. Exactly right.

Obviously the most famous early printers. Well, if you put aside the Chinese who were doing this sort of thing with woodblocks in like the 9th century or the Koreans who were doing it in like the 14th century. Right. In the 15th century, we have this guy, Johannes Gutenberg, who decided to use movable type because they wanted to reuse the blocks. Yeah. And he decided that it would be a good idea if people could have access to the Bible.

Okay. And he did a quick print run. He made 200 copies of the Bible. Okay. It took him three years. He just wasn't working hard enough. No, I know. But he had to invent things like a typeface.

He had to carve each little letter into a piece of wood that he could then reuse that piece of wood on the next page. Oh, my goodness. And if you ran out of E's, you'd have to carve another E. Do you know what? I was actually going to ask that a few minutes ago. You said about the cases full of letters. Are there sort of certain letters that are more common that would need to have more repetitions of that letter in the box? Yes, there are. And the very easy way to see which letters they are to look at a typewriter right the typewriter was designed the the keyboard was designed so that all the most popular letters were kind of away from each other so you know like

a s e um o l m and n they're all that they're all at the edges oh really and all the all the least popular letters like you know g and v and stuff like that is all in the middle that's interesting right so i can i can predict now we're going to be backing and forthing on tangents but whilst we're hanging around typewriters um i found that the one of the earliest typewriters we all picture the the keyboard each key has a a hammer that sort of flicks out and hits the paper one of the earliest typewriters was called the hansen writing ball which was invented in 1870 all of the letters in in their individual blocks are fixed to a hemisphere like half of a football and then this half of a football shape is tilted and shifted as you press each button so that each each letter that sits on the surface of

that ball is the only letter that sort of how old is this paper 1870 and amazingly i remember the day when i got my very first IBM golf ball typewriter. Oh, is that? Which uses exactly the same system. Does it really? And that must have been back in the 70s. Okay, so only 100 years later. Yeah.

Wow. Right, so where were we before we went on that tangent? Oh, we were talking about Gutenberg. Let's go back to Gutenberg. So when Gutenberg was printing his Bibles over the three years he made the 200 copies, he had to invent a typeface. Okay. And so he invented a typeface based on the way that monks drew their letters on illustrated Bibles.

So at that time, you had to make each book by hand and each book was hand was hand drawn so he invented this in like 1436 right is when gutenberg did the bible the typeface that he invented is called black letter and you can still get black letter for your computer i feel i've seen that on the on the i was to say font list, on the typeface list. On the typeface list. That's fascinating. So as you mentioned that typeface, oh, it's going to be so hard to not say font anymore. That typeface is based on the handwriting of monks.

Monks used to be sort of one of the only groups of people that were given an education and taught to read properly. They needed to read the Bibles in order to know what they contained, in order to tell the people who couldn't read. And therefore monks were learned and educated. They did all the writing. They did all the beautiful calligraphy. And because of that, early bookshops tended to be centered around churchyards because that's where the guys who make the books are. So in London, near St. Paul's Cathedral was an area called St. Paul's Churchyard. That was pretty much a byword for bookshop

because that's where the monks sold all of their books, either before or after the church service. So what led to it? Was it purely the fact that this was such an arduous, painstaking task that every copy of the Bible or whatever text it was had to be handwritten and painstakingly done? It was just too laborious?

Well, if you think about it, each copy of the Bible would have probably taken several dozen monks. It would have been a labor of their love for god um and would have taken several dozen monks at least five five to ten years to actually do it to do one bible goodness really yeah so 200 copies in three years is actually really racing away when you put it in those terms, yeah. Printing was used mostly for religious

things. There was lots of religious texts like Luther would print a pamphlet. Sure. You know,

that's in like the 16th century and then you get to the Reformation and then there's lots more printing takes place during the Reformation

and then you get into like the 1800s and in America, I mean, we have American listeners. So let's talk about Thomas Paine, an Englishman. But an Englishman who wrote a thing called Common Sense and actually printed it and published it and it got into circulation amongst, again, those who could read right fine um but thomas paine's common sense um thing that he's pamphlet that was like distributed

secretly amongst amongst the revolutionaries right okay um strange enough the date of the publication of common sense is 1776 right now i'm my mind is automatically going down the route of the Hamilton musical. There is actually a lyric in one of the songs I've been reading, Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. Ah. And the year at the time is 1776. So that's context. I'd never really looked into what that work was, but that makes sense.

How interesting. So we've done Mr. Guttenberg. The next up on the list of memorable names that I recognise from the printing industry is William Caxton. What do you know of William Caxton? He retrained as a printer. I think he was something else before he was a printer. He was. So he worked in the Royal Mint making coins.

And that sort of gave him the idea of using these metal blocks. As you said, sort of everything had previously been carved into wooden blocks for printing. And he came up with the idea rather than hand carving the letters into pieces of wood, we should make a mould and be able to reproduce them in metal so he took that knowledge and and took it into printing and um william caxton first brought printing to england as you've said it sort of existed elsewhere for a very long time he introduced it to england in the 1400s um the first piece of work that caxton printed on on one of his presses was uh chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And then shortly after William Caxton comes a fella who has one of the most

interesting names I've ever heard of, Wynkin de Word. Ooh, Wynkin de Word. How do you spell the de Word bit? So it's three words. It's Wynkin, W-Y-N-K-Y-N de of Word, W-O-R-D-E.

I don't know whether he came from a place called Word or if it's just that he was in the printing trade and therefore became associated with words and therefore that was his nickname. I haven't been able to find that out. He was an Alsatian. He was from, not like the dog, but he was from Alsace on the borders of Franceance germany switzerland um he moved over to

england in 1500 bought a little house uh on fleet street built a printing press uh and and he is nicknamed as the father of fleet street it was it was his particular press which was a bit faster a bit more easy to use whatever um that sort of started the whole printing revolution along Fleet Street, where it stayed for hundreds of years. Because all the newspapers used to be based in Fleet Street. And the last one that actually had a printing press actually in Fleet Street was the Daily Express. And the Daily Express was this amazing art deco building

with like shiny black marble front. It was absolutely the most beautiful building and you went in there and then you went downstairs and towards the back and there were these massive rolls of paper and printing presses and and then there were lorries out the back that would that would take the newspapers away brilliant so is there any uh sort of crossover there into your your other previous career in advertising? Presumably you spent a certain amount of time working out page layouts, what words should go where with which images and that sort of thing. Yes. We had a guy, well, in my agency, we had a chap who was so proficient with typefaces that if you said to him, can you please draw this headline in this typeface, he would go away and actually draw a mock-up of what your ad would look like in Garamond or in Bodoni or whatever.

Oh, goodness me. Well done. And he was incredible. And he would get all the letter spacing and the kind the leading correct. And then if we were happy with that, then it would go to a typographer who would then look at it and work out all the different ways that you can actually make it read as easily as possible. And the way that you make type read as easily as possible,

well, the easy, okay. This is going to get technical, isn't it? It's going to get technical. Well, not to start with, but because of the way that type is actually created, it used to be created by people with chisels in a bit of stone. So if you look on Greek and Roman buildings or Roman buildings especially, then you'll see that the type is actually carved into it. It's 3D.

Yes, okay. But if you don't have a little flourish on the end of each bit of line, like if you're making a T, for example, and you don't have those little things that drop down at the ends, either end of the T or the foot that it stands on at the bottom. I'm picturing Times New Roman and things like that. Yes, exactly. So that was created, again, for Fleet Street, at the bottom. I'm picturing Times New Roman and things like that. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So that was created, again, for Fleet Street, for the Times.

Oh, literally, the Times, Times New Roman. Yes. Great. And so they would carve these letters, and they would carve them in as a V. And if you end a V with a flat bit, it doesn't look very good. But if you end a V with a flat bit, it doesn't look very good. But if you end a V with a little flourish, then it makes it easier to stop the carving. What it also does is it makes it easier for people to read it because they know where the ends of the letters are.

Yes, okay. Yeah, yeah. So actually the easiest typefaces to read are the ones that have the little bits on the end. Yes. And what do we call those? I know that one. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Serifs.

Correct. And there's a typeface called sans serif, which means without serifs. Yes. Wonderful. So to make it easy to read, you need to also make the letters. So there's word spacing, letter spacing, and kerning. So word spacing is the distance between each individual word. Okay.

So you want them all to be, ideally, you want them to be uniform. Yes. Unless you want to emphasize a word specifically. Sure. And you want the letters within the word to be correctly spaced. So when you have blocks of wood and you have, say, a W next to an A, where you've got the end of the W at an angle and the beginning of the A at an angle, what tends to happen is that there's a large space between the two letters. So what you need to do is knock off a bit of the

wood on the bottom right-hand corner of the W, knock off a bit of the wood on the top left-hand corner of the A, so that you can move them closer together. Oh my goodness. So rather than having like gappy words, it all looks nice and neat and clean. Yeah. So that's called kerning. And the kern is actually like an overhanging bit of a letter. Okay, okay. So it's all to do with making it easier to read. The other thing that makes the sort of thing that I used to do easy to read is how long you make each column. So the human brain and the human eye find it quite difficult to handle a line of type that's over seven or eight words long.

Oh, really? So ideally what you would have is the maximum sort of eight words on a line. Yeah. And then you just go to the next line. Right. So that sort of explains why columns in a newspaper, for instance, are the width that they are. You have several shorter columns.

Yes. Generally newspapers are made up in a grid. Right. And each column is usually eight words long right so depending on how many words you have um is how wide or narrow the pieces because normally it's about the way you measure space in the newspaper the way you used to i think you probably still do is by the number of columns times the depth. So, for example, a very common size of an ad would be 25 by 4. And 25 by 4 is 25 centimetres deep by four columns wide.

Oh, I see. And the column width varies from newspaper to newspaper. Obviously, a full-scale, you know, a large newspaper. A broadsheet. A broadsheet, in fact, has much wider columns. Yes, because their sheet is broader. Yes, yes. Don't know the origin of tabloid, do you?

No, I don't. Well, leave that one. If anyone knows the origin of the word tabloid, let us know. Yes, that's why we have the comments thing, isn't it? There you go, see? Yeah. We're on a constant journey of learning just as much as anyone else. Please let us know.

So the other thing that you want to do is you also don't want it all squashed up, the type. So you need to have spacing between each line. Yes, sure. Now, these days, it's very easy. You just have line spacing. But originally, you had what's called leading. Okay. And leading was literally a piece of metal, a piece of lead, that went between each line of type.

Okay. And it was quite thin, so you could have like one piece of lead, like a slice. Can you imagine a slice of lead? Yeah, yeah. You'd put a slice of lead between each line, and if you wanted double spacing, you'd put two slices of lead between each line oh brilliant so that's why you that's why it's called leading see i feel i feel very silly now because

i'm sure i've gone into the haven't we all gone into the customization page of your margins on a on a document and i've seen the word leading and i've always wondered why there wasn't another one that said trailing or following so it's leading it's leading curse you English language for having so many words spelt the same way but with different meanings well you live you live near reading don't you reading yes I do live near reading so we were talking about the Daily Express and how they had the printers that actually printed the newspaper downstairs in the basement at the back.

And they had these enormous rolls, like tons of paper on a roll. A bit like the biggest roll of toilet paper you've ever seen in your life, a newspaper. And so the way that they work is they have a drum that the type wraps around the drum and the and the paper is like flies past the drum as the drums revolving so that so the drum revolves around goes into some printing ink comes back up as it rolls up the paper goes past it and is printed with the ink and then carries on on its journey to the next roller. Right, okay.

But the problem is that the printing ink is still wet on the paper. So what they used to use was jets of fire. I beg your pardon. So basically, the paper would go past these jets, which were like gas jets on your cooker. Yeah. And because the paper's moving past it so fast, the paper doesn't get hot enough to catch fire, but it's hot enough to dry the ink. Is that why we say hot off the press? when it comes off the press it's literally hot yes oh okay so you talked about uh rolls of paper being fed through uh the the printing press um

do you know when the idea of a roll of paper and the printing press that went with that came about i don't good i know something um it was 1846 and it was in america and it was a chap called richard march ho ho h o h o e e like the garden tool um and he invented the first rotary press and he uh yeah so he sort of came up with this idea of paper being curved around these rotating cylinders in one long continuous sheet. But the concept of a continuous roll of paper came about in 1799 in France. Wow, that's a long, that's earlier than I would have imagined. That's earlier than I would have imagined as well. So this was invented by a French gentleman called, I mean, I'm going to say Louis Robert. Being French, it was probably Louis Robert.

But he lived in France and he created this machine called the four-drenier machine, which sort of has a continuous feed of pulped up, you know, bits of paper and water and all the rest of it in this tray, which sort of has a wire screen running through it. And this wire mesh picks up the dried end of the pulp, lifts it over a roller, rolls it very slowly, by which time the next bit of the pulp has dried and adds itself on to the end of the previous bit. So it's sort of constantly picking up the pulp, drying it, rolling it round and making this roll of paper. And that's how that sort of worked. And that's all the way back in 1799. But the fact that the first printing press to use that

wasn't invented until the mid-1800s makes me wonder what on earth that paper was used for for the following 50 years. So there are a lot of typefaces out there that you can actually buy. And generally speaking, you can buy a typeface for like 20 to 50 quid. And that's a license to use it.

Okay, yeah. Because all of these foundries have to make money. So the way they make money is by licensing their typefaces. Right. The world's most expensive typeface was one called the JHA Bodoni Retallic. Right. The world's most expensive typeface was one called the JHA Badoni Retallic. Right. And a license for that is $5,000. Goodness me.

And I have no idea. I haven't even looked it up. I don't know what it looks like. I have no idea why you would want to pay $5,000 for a license fee for a typeface. Is it sort of the closest thing you can get to Google's font without actually being Google's font or something well a lot of a lot of those typefaces are um hand-drawn so so say for example something like something like google what they'll say they may take an ordinary typeface yeah but then they'll amend it slightly and hand draw it slightly right again so that they don't have to license it so that it then becomes their property its own, it becomes its own individual unique typeface. So anybody who's using, you know, like Volvo have their own unique typeface,

which, you know, as soon as you see something written in the Volvo typeface, you know it's a Volvo ad or you know it's… Yes, okay, yes. And if you can make it, if you can come up with a very distinctive typeface, then that helps you enormously with your branding. So where are we? What have we got left? I'll tell you what we could talk about is wedding invitations.

Okay. So one of the things that a lot of people in their life have printed, even if you've never been to a printer before uh and the best example of like fine printing is things like wedding invitations okay yes yeah and it's normally in sort of like a palace script or something or these days it probably isn't it is probably a bit more funky um there's a thing called embossing yes there is and there are there are two different ways to emboss. Okay. So the first way to emboss is the old-fashioned way, which is you actually make the letters slightly higher than normal print so that when you press down the card onto the ink

and then the letter underneath it, it actually embosses it. It makes an indent in the card. Yeah, that makes sense. So that's the expensive way of doing embossed invitations. What's the cheap way, Bruce? The cheap way is what you do is you print it as normal. While the ink is still wet, you sprinkle a sort of powder on top of it, which sticks to the wet ink.

Right. And then you heat it up. And what happens is that powder turns into a sort of a lacquer. Okay. So you're, in fact, lacquering the printing ink. And it just raises it ever so slightly. Right. So if you want to know whether somebody's spent a lot of money on the wedding,

if you run your thumb over the back of the invitation and if it's not indented on the back that means that they've but it is like embossed on the front yeah that means they've used this this method of embossing wow whereas if they if they've got if they've got um you know a fully embossed invitation then then you know that the bar is going to be really good. Well, I think that's all the information I have on print and type and all that sort of stuff. Have you got anything else, Bruce? No, I'm all out of fonts.

Or are you all out of typefaces? I was going to say, before we go, if you take nothing else with you from this, from this podcast, just take the fact that the typeface is the body, the font is the clothes. Well, there we go. That was Fact Orally. If you enjoyed it, I'm really glad. If you didn't enjoy it, give it another go next week. It might get better. You never know. And, oh, there are things we need to tell people to do. Yes, okay.

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