Explore Digital Edition of Printing Types from 1922

Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tions have come with it as the default font. We tend, there­fore, to regard it less as some­thing cre­at­ed than as some­thing for all intents and pur­pos­es eter­nal, but there was a time when pub­lish­ers had to active­ly adopt it. The first Amer­i­can firm to start using Times New Roman was the Mer­ry­mount Press, which had already made a high­ly pres­ti­gious name for itself with pub­li­ca­tions like the ele­gant Book of Com­mon Prayer financed by no less a cap­tain of indus­try than J. Pier­pont Mor­gan. But oth­er print­ers knew Mer­ry­mount for a book that would have inspired in them an equal­ly wor­ship­ful impulse.

“Released in 1922 with a lat­er revi­sion in 1937,” Print­ing Types: Their His­to­ry, Forms and Use “became known as the stan­dard work on the his­to­ry of [print­ing and typog­ra­phy] and a basic book for all inter­est­ed in the graph­ic arts. This two-vol­ume work spans near­ly 450 years and includes detailed analy­ses of the print­ers and type design­ers and their work.”

So writes the design­er Nicholas Rougeux, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his dig­i­tal edi­tions of vin­tage books like Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants; British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy; A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ, or Fam­i­ly of Hum­ming-Birds; Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours; Euclid’s Ele­ments, and Pierre-Joseph Red­outé’s col­lec­tions of rose and lily illus­tra­tions. His lat­est project to go live is a painstak­ing­ly assem­bled dig­i­tal edi­tion of Print­ing Types, which you can explore here.

That book was also orig­i­nal­ly the work of one man, Mer­ry­mount Press founder Daniel Berke­ley Updike. “Dur­ing his tenure at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, he taught a course on Tech­nique of Print­ing in the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion for five years,” Rougeux writes, “the lec­tures of which served as the basis for Print­ing Types. ” In the book, Updike offers a his­to­ry of “the art of typog­ra­phy from the dawn of West­ern print­ing in the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry to the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth — focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on Euro­pean print­ing in Ger­many, France, Italy, the Nether­lands, Spain, and Eng­land as well as the Unit­ed States.” In trac­ing “the devel­op­ment of type design,” he also dis­cuss­es “the impor­tance of each his­toric peri­od and the lessons they con­tain for con­tem­po­rary design­ers.”

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1922 and exten­sive­ly revised in 1937, Print­ing Types long stood as the author­i­ta­tive his­to­ry of typog­ra­phy in the Latin alpha­bet, with its “more than 360 fac­sim­i­le illus­tra­tions show­cas­ing exam­ples of typog­ra­phy, bor­ders, flow­ers, and pages pulled from the books cov­ered.” Track­ing down the sources of those illus­tra­tions con­sti­tut­ed no small part of the painstak­ing pro­duc­tion of Rougeux’s dig­i­tal edi­tion, and the 100 of them most high­ly praised by Updike have also been made avail­able for pur­chase in poster form. For those who do a lot of work with text, in print or dig­i­tal forms, it could pro­vide just as much moti­va­tion as an actu­al copy of Print­ing Types on the shelf to find our way beyond the defaults.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Dis­cov­er the First Illus­trat­ed Book Print­ed in Eng­lish, William Caxton’s Mir­ror of the World (1481)

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

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