One of my favorite possessions
is a lovely compartmen-talized tray from a newspaper printer’s type cabinet;
each tray is a single wooden drawer from a chest that held a variety of
typefaces in a variety of sizes used to set type for both news copy and
advertising.
There used to be separate trays—or cases—for capital
letters and regular letters (which is why we call them upper and lower case
letters today), but that meant two drawers for each size of a particular font;
a combined case like this became popular in the 1800s (this shot shows only two of the three sections of the tray).
Just as the “qwerty” layout of your keyboard is designed to
make typing more efficient, so too were the compartments in a type tray
designed for the convenience of the typesetter—the most frequently used letters
were set in boxes in the center of the tray while the others were located on
the edges and in the corners.
Numbers
and oddball symbols ($, @, + and %, for instance) were in the top boxes of the
compartments, lower case letters were on the left side of the drawer, upper case
on the right.
Punctuation
compartments were not always designated—many typesetters placed them in their
own preferred locations.
This tray holds an incomplete
set of Bodoni bold type—one of the most commonly used typefaces in the 19th
and 20th centuries, mainly because it is so easy to read.
Giambattista Bodoni, the designer,
was born in Italy in 1740. His father was a printer, so he grew up in the
trade; he apprenticed at the Vatican ,
and later became a well-known typecutter, engraver and printer.
In 1798, he designed this
typeface—a font that blended the thicker lines of older typefaces with the
finer, thinner ones of newer designs.
Bodoni gains its gracefulness
from a balance between those thick and thin strokes of the letters. If designed
well, books typeset in Bodoni can produce that same graceful loveliness on an
entire page, especially when the letters have some space between them, which
keeps the lines smooth and easy to read.
Many of us read schoolbooks set
in Bodoni (easy to read, remember?) and its broad face makes for a quick read
on posters and advertising boards.