Notes

Type & Paper is the first in a series of five booklets written and designed by Carl Dair for The E. B. Eddy Paper Company. Dair chose; Caslon (Old Style), Bodoni (Modern), Futura (Sans Serif), Stymie (Square Serif), and Lydian (Calligraphic), to represent the five basic type classifications. He discusses the characteristics of each family; how they change appearance when printed on different papers or when reversed out of coloured backgrounds or used with various screen effects, as well as how they look when combined with different display faces.

In the mid 1940s this kind of practical detailed information about typefaces and how they functioned in typical day-to-day circumstances, was hard to find. Within a few years these monographs were being used as text books in some well-known schools, including the Institute of Design in Chicago and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Both Type & Paper and Design for Printing were so popular that second printings were soon required.

Dair’s large brush lettered calligraphic ampersand is the only decorative element on the cover, it also harmonizes well with the typeface Lydian. The five principal typefaces used in the double-page spread were set in 12 point type and then enlarged six times to approximate 72 point. Long before it was possible for designers to ‘zoom in’ on the type Dair mimicked the effect to show how the choice of paper affected the final look of a typeface. – Rod McDonald

Artifact Text:

On the inside front cover there is a quotation on the origins of the ampersand from the American type designer Frederick W. Goudy:

What’s an ampersand?

“An ampersand! What in Sam Hill is an ampersand? This question is frequently asked. Indeed, the number of readers otherwise well informed who do not know the word itself, or its meaning, is surprisingly large.

“I could of course, say to the enquirer that the word ‘ampersand’ is a corruption of the mixed English and Latin phrase ‘and per se and’ … the name of the sign & which is a monogram of the two letters e, t, of the Latin word et, or in English, and, I usually say ‘it is a short form and,’ and let it go at that.” — Frederick W. Goudy.

Dair also explains the origin of the large brush lettered ampersand he drew for the cover: The ampersand used on the cover is redrawn from one written in a pardon issued by King Henry VI in 1446, where the et form is still dominant.