A note On The Type

J. G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island culminates in a scene of writing. Speeding along the M4 outside London, architect Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar through a guardrail and into a vast triangle of waste ground beneath an intersection of overpasses, finding himself injured and unable to climb the steep embankments to rescue. As night falls, he ignites the engine of the mangled Jag with the car’s cigarette lighter, but the brief blaze fails to halt the rush of traffic overhead. Left to sleep in the charred hulk of the automobile, Maitland awakens to notice a retaining wall across the island: “The rain-washed concrete shone brightly in the sunlight like an empty noticeboard.

A message scrawled across it in three-feet-high letters would be legible to drivers on the motorway.”

Desperately in need of writing instruments, he harvests blackened, burnt rubber terminals from the engine’s distributor caps, using them to mark out “HELP INJURED DRIVER CALL POLICE.” Soon, storm clouds gather, and it begins to pour. Maitland takes cover in the remnants of a basement doorway.

A small printing shop had once been here, and a few copper-backed letterpress blocks lay around his feet. Maitland picked one up and examined the cloudy figures of a dark-suited man and a white-haired woman. As he listened to the rain, he thought of his parents’ divorce; the uncertainties of this period, when he was eight years old, seemed to be replicated in the negative image on the letterpress plate.

When Maitland emerges after the storm, he notices that the letters of his message have been “reduced to black smudges.”

Delirious with fever, he wonders: “Was he still trapped inside his car? Was the entire island an extension of the Jaguar, its windshield and windows transformed by his delirium into these embankments? Perhaps the windshield wipers had jammed… and were tracing some incoherent message on the steaming glass.”

This scene of writing and erasure traces the contours of Western typographic history— from marks made by the human hand to mechanical reproduction, to a vision of automated, machinic writing that exceeds human agency. The contraction of the island in Maitland’s mind to the crashed Jaguar is mirrored by its expansion in Ballard’s narrative to encompass the recent history of Great Britain. Similarly, the shattered body of the Jaguar echoes Maitland’s own. The scene itself is doubled when Maitland attempts to trick a reluctant Proctor into spelling out a rescue message: “Already the wavering letters of his first alphabet had become strong and well-formed. Using both hands he struck at the concrete slope, slashing his A’s and X’s side by side.” Soon enthusiasm gets the best of him, and he begins to mix up the letters “into an indecipherable mass,” eventually rubbing out the message and refusing to go on.

"The scene of writing and erasure traces the contours of Western typographic history— from marks made by the human hand to mechanical reproduction, to a vision of automated, machinic writing that exceeds human agency."

The failure of Maitland’s writing lesson foregrounds what remains “uncertain” and “indecipherable” in the mechanization of human language. Beginning in the fifteenth century, humanist handwriting, secured through imitation, transformed the hand into a writing machine. Lowercase Roman letters emerged from this prosthetic pen-in-hand imitating the litterae antiquae of Carolingian manuscripts, while capitals traced their origins to Roman monuments, the work of stone carvers wielding hammer and chisel. Geoffroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529) delineated the proportions of the ideal Roman capital, thus submitting typography and the body to the grid, compass, and rule. With the printing press, the humanist’s script was adapted to mechanical reproduction, giving rise to the digitized Roman fonts we use today.

"The failure of Maitland’s writing lesson foregrounds what remains 'uncertain' and 'indecipherable' in the mechanization of human language."

In what follows, I want to use Ballard’s narrative to reflect on the controversy surrounding the creation of Times New Roman, perhaps the most ubiquitous of typefaces. In 1929, an advertising request by The Times prompted a tirade against the paper’s outdated typography by Stanley Morison, leading to his appointment as “typographical advisor” to William Lints-Smith. Dissatisfied with existing typefaces, Morison decided a new, supremely legible typeface was needed. A committee approved two approaches: a thickened version of Eric Gill’s Perpetua and a “modernized Plantin.” Focusing on the latter, Morison claimed to have “excogitated” the design of Times New Roman, “pencilled the original set of drawings, and handed them to Victor Lardent.” These drawings were finalized by Monotype after numerous revisions.

After Morison’s death in 1967, biographers began identifying inconsistencies in his account. Morison was not a draftsman, and it was unlikely he had drawn the forms. Victor Lardent later stated Morison had handed him a photographic copy of a page from a book printed by Plantin as a basis.

The nature of this “photographic copy” remains speculative. Measurements of Times New Roman bear close resemblance to Monotype Plantin, suggesting some preexisting model was used. Still, this ur-form—and who was responsible for it—remains elusive. Morison’s own remarks only cloud the issue: “It has the merit of looking as if it had not been designed by anyone in particular.”

In 1994, the origin of Times New Roman gained new traction through Mike Parker, who claimed the font’s original drawings were created in the early 1900s by American engineer William Starling Burgess. Parker’s evidence relied heavily on Burgess’s biography and second-hand information, suggesting Burgess had drawn and commissioned Series 54 from Lanston Monotype. However, his claim, made on scant evidence, was dismantled by four experts in a rebuttal, questioning the validity of Parker’s sources and dismissing his formal comparisons.

Reviewing the accepted prehistory of Times New Roman and citing extant memos from the Monotype type drawing office in 1931, Barker concludes that the “photographic copy” handed to Lardent by Morison must have been an image of a later printing of Granjon’s Gros Cicero type, likely Max Roose’s Index Characterum Architypographiae of 1905. The proof, he argues, is the appearance of the lowercase “a” in the final design, a remnant of the substitution of an “a” from another font when Granjon’s original types were acquired by the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and used to print Roose’s Index, which then served as the model for Times New Roman.

Despite these counterarguments, Parker developed Giampa’s “Burgess” into a typeface renamed Starling, released in 2009. With Parker’s death in 2014, his theory circulated again. However, a comprehensive biography of Burgess published in 2015 cites no evidence of Burgess’s involvement in type design.

So the question remains, who designed Times New Roman? Parker, a typographic expert and respected industry veteran, could hardly be described as a crank or a dupe. Giampa, meanwhile, who died in 2009, is a shadowy figure whose motives remain obscure—financial gain? character assassination? legitimate historical recovery? As recounted in the Financial Times, a 2000 flood destroyed any remaining evidence in the Lanston Monotype archive that Giampa had purchased, and supposed original documents reviewed by Parker in the Smithsonian in 1996 are reportedly contaminated and no longer accessible. A 1941 bomb blast near Monotype’s London offices had also destroyed many of the original records concerning Morison’s work on Times New Roman. Still, surely an authority like Parker must have seem something that convinced him, and the persistence of the Burgess story and its grudging acceptance within design history points, at the very least, to an unresolved need to come to terms with its creation.

This detour into the gentlemanly world of typographic controversy is traversed by a complex series of doublings that locate the development of Times New Roman firmly within the “body machine complex” of the early twentieth century. Naval architect, aviation pioneer, and later co-designer of the Dymaxion car with Buckminster Fuller, Burgess doubles Morison, authority on the mechanization of typography and a railroad enthusiast who rode on the footplate of a Gresley A1 Pacific locomotive all the way to Edinburgh and enthusiastically attended the departure of the high-speed Flying Scotsman on its first non-stop trip along the London and North Eastern Railway.

Like J. G. Ballard’s Maitland behind the wheel of his Jaguar, both were men whose “intimacy with machines” is of a piece with a culture of locomotion in which agency is uncertain, and the human body, no less than the type body, is submitted to new disciplinary regimes—the timetable, machine work, and the grid—that are shadowed by the spectre of the automaton.

In fact, in a promotional pamphlet published by The Times in conjunction with the debut of the new redesign of the paper Morison explained that:

"The need for the new typeface was a response to the dramatic changes in reading habits occasioned by the acceleration of human transport."

It is evident that there must be changes in typography as long as our social habits are open to variation. When it was founded, The Times was largely read in coffeehouses; in the nineteenth century it came to be read in trains; to-day it is largely read in cars and airliners. Reading habits, dependent on social habits, will not remain constant. Neither must newspaper typography remain constant.

Who better, then, to have designed Times New Roman than an architect-engineer and future car designer? Or perhaps “Burgess” might simply stand for the uncertainties that obtain in the collision of bodies and technologies whose contours the writing scenes in Ballard’s Concrete Island circumscribe, and which lie at the very heart of typographic history, from the humanist pen and the printing press straight through to the TextEdit software that this essay is being written in—the “no one in particular” whose authorship Morison takes as “the chief merit” of Times New Roman.

"Reading habits, dependent on social habits, will not remain constant. Neither must newspaper typography remain constant."

By way of conclusion this question of agency suggests one more doubling, and a silence that thus far marks a glaring absence from any account of Stanley Morison: the figure of Beatrice Warde.

Former librarian for ATC, the American Type Founders Company, and ex-wife of Frederic Warde, director of printing at Princeton University, Beatrice Warde joined the Monotype Corporation in London in 1927 as editor of its house journal, The Monotype Recorder, and was soon promoted to head of publicity, a position she held until her retirement in 1960. Warde’s initial appointment had come thanks to an article she had written for the typographic journal that Morison edited, The Fleuron, in which she had unraveled the question of the origins of the typeface Garamond, having tracked down the original sixteenthcentury punches in Europe. It was an impressive piece of typographic detective work, published by Warde anonymously under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon. Monotype, it was said, had been shocked when a woman arrived to take the job.

Warde and Morison would become lifelong friends and close colleagues, and it was to her that he sent a cable announcing the committee’s approval of the decision to change the masthead of The Times, the final element in the paper’s conversion to Times New Roman: “DIRECTORS AND ALL EDITORIAL EMINENTISSIMI UNANIMOUS ROMAN HEADING.” Morison, who famously disdained the use of first names, addressed his letters to Warde at this time “Dear P,” and it was thus as Paul Beaujon—a male moniker that seems to have been something between an open secret, an inside joke, and a mark of respect—that Beatrice Warde came to join the fraternity of men who led the typographic renaissance that began after World War I, although she was still unable to attend meetings of the Double Crown Club.

Warde’s other great contribution to the theory of typography is the essay “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should be Invisible,” first delivered as a lecture in 1930 and still read by every undergraduate design student, in which she advocates for the transparent quality of good typography. The essay could easily serve as a brief for Times New Roman, now so commonplace that one contemporary commentator has stated that, “To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.”

Recalling the “negative image” of the “unknown man and woman” that occasions Robert Maitland’s reverie in the ruined printshop in Concrete Island, it is tempting to imagine what Beatrice Warde’s role in the development of Times New Roman might have been, and the status of the still-elusive “photographic copy” that Lardent claims to have been handed by Morison. As an accomplished type scholar and researcher Warde most certainly knew her way around an archive, and as an American and former librarian at ATC she had industry connections in the States. Her ex-husband, Frederic, we know, attended the Lanston Monotype School in Philadelphia to learn how to work the machinery. As a publicist at Monotype, Warde would also, no doubt, have had regular dealings with the publicity department at The Times, and could have recommended Victor Lardent—whose primary occupation was the drafting of advertisements—for his “unusually firm and lean line.”

"Warde’s other great contribution to the theory of typography is the essay 'The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should be Invisible,' in which she advocates for the transparent quality of good typography."

Could “Paul Beaujon” —that doubly-gendered vanishing mediator —have been the source of the “photographic copy” that served as the model for Times New Roman? That, we cannot know. After all, invisibility, Warde insisted, is the sign of good typography, just as every type designer knows that the spaces between letters —the counterforms — are just as important as the marks on the page. So too, the questions and doublings that persist around the design of Times New Roman point to the collision of bodies and technologies that shape the development of modern letterforms—and the lapses and failures that attend them.