Thanks to Jacob Covey for kindly pointing me in the direction Kern Your Enthusiasm, a new series of short posts at HiLobrow about typefaces.
Matthew Battles, author of Library: An Unquiet History (and co-founder of HiLobrow), kicked off the series on Friday with a fascinating post about Aldine Italic:
Aldus Manutius was a printer in sixteenth-century Venice, and he was looking to shake things up. The roman typefaces, based on manuscript letterforms the humanists thought dated back to Roman times (but which were in fact medieval in origin) had offered Italian counterpoint to the black-letter typefaces of the first German printers, but already they were old hat. When Aldus put the first version of a typeface we call italic to use in 1501, the printing press had been proliferating in Europe for half a century. In other words, it was about as old as the computer is now. It was a time of immense invention and swiftly spun variety in the printed book, and a time of new mobility and independence of thought and activity among certain classes of people as well — and the combination of new ways and new tools meant new kinds of books. Crucially, the book was getting smaller, small enough to act not only as a desktop, but as a mobile device.
There is also a rather lovely short piece by Mark Kingwell, posted today, on Gill Sans.
Jacob himself has contributed a post, scheduled to appear at the end of the series, about Gotham. Can’t wait.