All other images: Rare Book Division and General Research Division. “Sphinx” diagram courtesy Wikimedia Commons. For starters, try Alexander Lawson’s Anatomy of a Typeface, Stanley Morison’s A Tally of Types, or Daniel Updike’s Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. If you’re taken with typography, then NYPL has a mountain of resources for you. But at 82 years old, Times New Roman is still going strong and proving that our humblest word processing friends have some pretty historic beginnings. Indeed, Times New Roman’s chief competitors these days are Arial and Calibri, two typefaces whose lack of serifs makes them easier to read on a screen, according to many. This idea that the use of a typeface affects its form struck me as very relevant to today’s world of e-book publishing and web-based content. In 1932, The Times specifically noted that their new typeface was not intended for books: “It is a newspaper type-and hardly a book type-for it is strictly appointed for use in short lines-i.e., in columns.” They later developed a wider version adapted to fit a book’s longer lines of text. That’s why the name of this typeface is slightly different depending on your choice of Mac or PC! Monotype named its type “Times New Roman,” while Linotype used “Times Roman.” Fast forward to the computer era: when selecting “ fonts” for their word processing programs, Apple chose to license the Linotype catalog, and Microsoft licensed Monotype’s. Both companies subsequently made sets of the type for purchase. The original hardware for the typeface- the “punches” that helped create the molds for casting type-were created jointly by the Monotype Corporation and the Linotype Company, the two main manufacturers of automated typesetting machines and equipment at that time. This is easier to illustrate than describe, so check out this handy diagram:Īn interesting footnote to the development of Times New Roman trickles down to us in the present day. This is the distance between the top and bottom of a lower-case letter without ascending or descending parts, like a, c, or m. To achieve efficiency, Morison raised what is called the “x-height” of the letters. The Rare Book Division has an example of Gros Cicero in Surius’ Commentarivs Brevis Rervm In Orbe Gestarvm, printed in 1574. The “cicero” in Gros Cicero was a contemporary term for the size of the type-today, we would describe cicero’s size as 11.5-point-and the “gros” referred to the proportions of the letters. He liked the look of the modern typeface Plantin, which was based on the older typeface Gros Cicero, designed by Robert Granjon. Morison looked to classical type designs for inspiration. Morison wanted any printing in his typeface to be economical, a necessity in the newspaper business, but he also wanted the process of reading to be easy on the eye. Morison enlisted the help of draftsman Victor Lardent and began conceptualizing a new typeface with two goals in mind: efficiency-maximizing the amount of type that would fit on a line and thus on a page-and readability. So The Times asked him to create something better. You might be surprised to learn that Times New Roman began as a challenge, when esteemed type designer Stanley Morison criticized London’s newspaper The Times for being out-of-touch with modern typographical trends. It’s so ubiquitous that we take it for granted, but just like Spider-Man or Wolverine, this super-typeface has its own origin story. If you open up your word processing software and start typing, chances are you’re looking at Times New Roman.
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