Heh. That’s a very good idea.

What were, in your opinion, some of the important typefaces of the last century?

I can only talk confidently about the kinds of fonts that I myself like and use — classic typefaces for bookwork.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the best faces were almost always produced by Monotype, but that firm unfortunately fumbled the ball when the era of hot metal came to an end. Monotype’s digital versions (and, slightly earlier, the versions for phototypesetting) of its own library of typefaces were often embarrassingly bad: Perpetua, Bembo, Bell, and Centaur, for example — all great Monotype triumphs in the days of letterpress printing — seem to me, now essentially unusable in their present forms. The Monotype faces that still look good in the twenty-first century are mainly ones that were a bit heavy to begin with, such as Poliphilus, Bulmer and Erhardt. I think even Times Roman — that poor, tired, overworked old warhorse — could be made into a decent typeface if it were supplied with long descenders (Monotype had such a variant in pre-digital days) and were used with f-ligatures, true small caps, old-style figures, and of course sensitive leading and word-spacing.

Of the faces designed since the digital revolution, my favorites for bookwork are Adobe Caslon, Founder’s Caslon, Minion, Galliard, and Miller. Miller in particular fascinates me, because my own historical and cultural interests lie mostly in the nineteenth century, and Matthew Carter’s model for Miller — Scotch Roman — is one of the few enduring types of that Century. Miller isn’t glamorous (though it has a lot of period charm), but I find it terribly useful for bread-and-butter books like reference works.

Obviously there are other wonderful book faces floating around (Sabon, Dante, and Hoefler Text are examples that come immediately to mind), but I feel I don’t have an intelligent opinion of any type until I actually use it or at least play around with it. At the moment, I’m looking forward to trying out Monticello, Matthew Carter’s new revival of one of the earliest American typefaces.

Getting back to D.B Updike, what effect did World Wars I and II have on him as far as shaping the work he did towards the end of his career?

I don’t know whether the First World War had much effect on Updike’s printing (though it certainly cut him off from friends and collaborators like T. M. Cleland when they enlisted), and the beginning of the Second — the beginning for Americans, at least — coincided very closely with Updike’s death. He was terribly preoccupied, in his final days, with the military struggle in Europe, and it confirmed his darkest fears of an impending collapse of civilization. In the final essay that I included in The Well-Made Book, entitled “A Last Word” (1941), he argued that although the future looks uncertain, we must remind ourselves that the great craftsmen (including printers) and artists of the past also lived in troubled times: “For life, in nature and in human nature, after each cosmic disaster or phase of man’s folly, is renewed again and again.” Those seem like timely words right now, don’t they?

They definitely do.

He had an amazing dedication to his craft. Every nuance of a job was thoughtfully considered by how it would be used or displayed. Do you think it’s fair to say that he was one of the first “usability experts?”

I’m not sure exactly what label is appropriate for Updike. I’d be more inclined to say he was one of the first real book-designers. When I first started thinking about writing a book on the Kelmscott Press, I spent a full summer at the Library of Congress reading nineteenth-century printer’s manuals and professional journals, trying to understand how Victorian printers and publishers understood the designing of books before Morris came along. My research was a great exercise in futility, because it became clear that there was then very little "designing" in the modern sense. Morris changed that — he demonstrated that creating a beautiful book required artistic skills of the highest order — and Updike was one of the very earliest young commercial printers at the time to understand the implications of that discovery.

And of course he was a brilliant designer, though much more self-effacing than, say, Bruce Rogers, his great contemporary (and rival). The intense preoccupation with detail that you mention, incidentally, seems to be characteristic of all successful book-designers. If you asked my old friend John Dreyfus (who, sadly, died just recently) for directions to a bus stop near his flat in London, he would explain it to you in excruciating detail for twenty minutes and then would walk with you to it so that you could not get lost. That’s a designer’s instinct: spell everything out so that nothing is left to chance, because the basic rule of a designer’s professional life is that if anything can go wrong in production, it will.

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