easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Two weeks ago I got back from the 2025 ATypI conference in Copenhagen. This was the first time ATypI had gone to Copenhagen since the 2001 conference – which took place just two weeks after 9/11. As you can imagine, being an American in Denmark in those two years had quite different resonances. In 2001, before George W. Bush turned an atrocious crime into a misguided war, the reaction of people abroad was aghast sympathy. This year, the people I spoke with in Copenhagen mostly offered wry commiseration, along with lots of questions. (There was one Persian taxi driver who had a good knowledge of U.S. politics and with whom I had a fascinating conversation on the way from hotel to conference venue.)

The conference was held at the Royal Danish Academy (Det Kongelige Akademi – Arkitektur, Design, Konservering), in buildings that had once housed part of the Danish Navy. The lead local organizer was Sophie Beier, who teaches at the Academy and heads up its Centre for Visibility Design (and has spoken many times at previous ATypI conferences about legibility and readability). This year there were two tracks of programming, in two separate spaces in the same building – the same building, but you had to go outside to get from one to the other. As at most events like this, you finally figure out how to get around and how to find all the places you need to be just before the event ends – and that hard-won information is stuck in your memory with no possible future use. I can say that if you got dropped off at the Academy’s address by a taxi or Uber, it would take you a while to find the entrance to the conference. But people at the Academy were quite willing to direct you.

One thing that had struck me when I first looked at the program and the list of speakers was that most of the names were not familiar to me. That could be disconcerting but was mostly encouraging; it means that the Association is not mired in old habits but open to new people and new ideas. Indeed, a large number of the talks were unrelated to traditional European typography and type design; there were even, on the last day, two different talks about aspects of Chinese type scheduled opposite each other. (Okay, that might be excessive; I would have liked to listen to both.) I am not a fan of multiple tracks of programming, since you always have to choose one or the other, but the organizers this year were very good at keeping the two schedules coordinated and giving people ample time to move between the two tracks at will.

And what did people talk about? Oh, you know, the usual: type, typography, reading, publishing, various scripts, technical underpinnings of typesetting and type design. Just to give you an idea of the range, here are the first two talks, which were on opposite each other on Wednesday morning: “Knud V. Engelhardt, a Danish Typographic Pioneer” and “Streamlining and Flexible Traditional Chinese Type Design with Open-Source Character Set.”

There were several talks on fonts for African languages, and a panel discussion of designing for the Arabic script in different countries, Arab and non-Arab. Niteesh Yadav’s talk on “Typography as a Living Medium,” about adapting text for use in Augmented and Virtual Reality, particularly caught my attention: what he said seemed like a logical extension of the concerns I’ve been involved with for several years for readable typography for the screen. (I asked Niteesh to write something for the Scripta Typographic Institute site, which I’ve let languish for far too long. The conversation could use a refresh.)

It’s never possible to see everything and talk to everybody. In the interests of my ATypI history project, I had lunch with the organizers of the previous Copenhagen conference, Henrik Birkvig and Torben Wilhelmsen, and quizzed them for their memories, with my trusty voice-recording phone turned on. A number of people offered new information about past conferences, some from personal memory and some from knowledge of older documentation. (I’m working on the chapter about the 1960s now, and it’s going to be a work in progress, as I try to fill in the holes in the fossil record.) On the first days, when the weather was unwelcoming, the only place to foregather easily was the relatively small hallway outside the main auditorium with its excellent coffee bar; but when the weather improved and the sun came out, people would spill out onto the grass, which was also where various demonstrations were set up under a tent. Apart from the coffee bar and a cafeteria, the options for meals required a bit of a walk, but there were some water-side restaurants and a popular outdoor food court not far away.

The Poles managed the conference’s infrastructure brilliantly. The Finns and Brazilians got me into late-night trouble with unending parties. The Chinese got us all talking about hanzi. The Danes, of course, welcomed us to their country and their typographic traditions. I enjoyed both social and intellectual interaction with people from Australia, Britain, Germany, India, Lebanon, Poland, the Netherlands, Argentina, Portugal, Austria, and even the USA. That’s one of the pleasures and also the values of an ATypI conference.

[Above: attendees at the official reception in Copenhagen’s ornate City Hall; the building at the Royal Danish Academy where the ATypI program took place; Taurai Valerie Mtake on “The future is ancestral.”]

Categorized as events, people, type history, typography |

At long last, after more than 17 years of ups, downs, and circuitous side trips, the 40th anniversary edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big was published in late 2022, and the limited Numbered and Lettered editions are finally being distributed. The extra delay on the limited editions involved two different shipments of slipcases being lost en route from China, as well as a painstaking on-site check to ensure that each of the individually signed and inscribed four-page signatures got into the right individual copy. Plus, of course, the apparently inevitable twists and turns of fortune that have accompanied this project from the beginning. (Ben Kamm attributes this to the troublesome whims of the fay. I just say it must be Coyote.)

The Trade edition won an award at the Publishing Professionals Network (PPN) Book Show last year. (As manager of the judging team, I was involved in the judging process, but I recused myself from any consideration of my own book. As did judges whose books had been submitted.) The Trade edition itself is a luxurious book: 800 pages including etchings and prints by Peter Milton, exquisitely printed in a 7.5×10-inch format on Mohawk Superfine by Brilliant Graphics in Exton, Pennsylvania. The Numbered and Lettered editions (which sold out years ago) include a new short story by John Crowley, as well as the slipcases with more Peter Milton art. In the Lettered copies, Crowley wrote out a short passage from the novel in his elegant chancery italic handwriting.

The vision behind this project was Ron Drummond’s, publisher of Incunabula and instigator of ambitious undertakings. Ron and I collaborated over many years on the details of the book’s design; the overall page grid and the details of typesetting were mine, with Ron deciding on image trims and specifying the placement of Peter Milton’s art. Ron also commissioned three different essays about the book, to be published on the generous flaps of the dustjackets, one for each of the three editions. (On the Trade edition, which you can still purchase, the essay is by Neil Gaiman.)

It’s been a very long process. As I’ve written before, there were times when I took to referring to this as “Zeno’s book project,” because like Zeno’s arrow it seemed that it would never reach its target. Amazingly, it has. And it seems to be a bulls-eye.

[Images: The three editions of the Little, Big 40th anniversary edition: Numbered (top), Lettered (middle), and Trade (bottom).]

Categorized as book design, books, design, editorial design, people, printing, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

I’ve just finished reading Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, by Steve Paul (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2021). Connell is a peculiar writer, impossible to categorize; he’s been a favorite of mine since I first discovered his writing through North Point Press, my favorite American book publisher of the 1980s. He’s probably best known for his bestseller about Custer, Son of the Morning Star, which examines the Battle of the Little Big Horn from both sides, with its antecedents, its contexts, and its implications. He’s a master of finding the arresting detail, and his prose is wry and precise.

Mid-way through his career, Connell became closely involved with Berkeley-based North Point Press. “Everybody there is intelligent and courteous and they all seem to know what they’re doing – which is not at all true of some people I’ve met in the NY industry.” Jack Shoemaker, North Point’s editor in chief, encouraged Connell and continued to be his editor after North Point shut down and Shoemaker had to create a new publishing company (twice). Steve Paul devotes quite a few pages of the biography to North Point, giving me more background than I knew before now. He describes Shoemaker’s and publisher William Turnbull’s desire to make quality books, though he doesn’t mention David Bullen, North Point’s long-time book designer, who was responsible for how the books looked and felt. (Nor does he mention Jack Stauffacher, who was involved at the press’s inception and set some of the typographic standards that North Point became known for). What Bullen did at North Point was a strong influence on my own ideas about book design.

The other book that Evan S. Connell is best known for is his early novel, Mrs. Bridge, which is highly respected though I haven’t read it. His examination, in detail, of the empty life of an affluent Kansas City matron has simply never appealed to me; I’m much more fascinated by his delvings into history and art. Another of his books that I’ve failed to finish, despite being history-based, is Deus lo volt! (“God wills it!”), which is so effective at conveying the spirit and mindset of the Christians who launched the Crusades that I couldn’t go on; I couldn’t stand being inside their blinkered heads. Maybe one day I’ll come back to it.

But I have read quite a few of Connell’s books, either bought new in North Point editions (which were sometimes reissues) or found and snapped up in used-book stores. Connell’s life is somewhat opaque; he was a private person, notably untalkative. Steve Paul is smart to call his biography a “writing life”; that was clearly the way Connell saw himself. Paul makes it clear, though, that Connell had connections to much livelier characters, especially when he was living in Sausalito and San Francisco. And Paul is good at weaving the strands of Connell’s life together, and at showing how the writing, the publishing, the extensive, usually solitary travel, and the thoughts he expressed were all woven of the same cloth. Or perhaps, given his fascination with pre-Columbian pottery, I should say that they were thrown from the same clay.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, letters, people, publishing, writing & editing |

Christopher Burke, Gerard Unger: Life in Letters (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij de Buitenkant, 2021).

Christopher Burke writes clearly and knowledgeably about type and the people who design it. His just-published biography of Dutch type designer Gerard Unger, one of the most prolific and talented type designers of the later 20th century and the early 21st, is quite simply a must-have book. It’s well made, effectively designed, artfully written, and lavishly illustrated.

Gerard Unger: Life in Letters is above all a book about process. In tracing Unger’s life and career, Burke shows Unger repeatedly wrestling with new techniques and new technologies, figuring out how to take advantage of them and finding creative ways to put even their constraints to use. Unger did not begin by cutting metal punches, but he came into the field of typography when it was adapting to phototypesetting, and he then encountered each new iteration of digital typesetting and type design. The book’s ample and detailed illustrations show these processes in abundance.

Unger was a pragmatic designer, always focused on making type that people could actually read. Whether designing signage faces for highways or metros, or text faces for daily newspapers, he studied what made the letters readable and incorporated his insights into each design. The distinctive curve forms of his letters were unique to him, often making it easy to spot an Unger typeface when you saw it. He incorporated history but always created something new; his last major typeface, Alverata, with its sanserif companion Sanserata, is both a usable text face and an exuberant expression of letter forms that first blossomed in Romanesque lettering a thousand years ago.

[Originally published on October 1, 2021, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as books, people, type designers, type history, typography |

Need a font that’s strange and bonkers but also well made and usable? And a new one every month? Then join the Font of the Month Club.

Type designer David Jonathan Ross, better known as “DJR,” worked for nearly ten years at The Font Bureau, before starting his own independent digital type foundry in 2016. In 2018, he was awarded the Prix Charles Peignot, given by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) to an outstanding type designer under the age of 35. You can find practical, versatile type families like Roslindale, Gimlet, and Forma at Type Network or through DJR’s own website. But what’s fascinating is when he goes wild, taking established typographic norms and forms and turning them inside out, to see what they might be capable of.

That’s what his Font of the Month Club is for. You can subscribe for a nominal fee ($6/month, or $2/month if you have a financial hardship), and every month Ross will send you a different, unpredictable new font. It might be something as pragmatic as Fern Text or as geometrically crazy as Megazoid, as spectacularly reverse-contrast as Tortellini or as unabashedly Victorian as Clavichord.

I have sometimes found ways to put some of these fonts to use the very month they are released. I’ve recently used Roslindale, Dattilo, Job Clarendon, and Rhododendron on book covers, for instance. It’s a delight to be able to send DJR a PDF that shows his typefaces in use (as I try to do whenever I’m using typefaces by a contemporary type designer). And it’s fun to try out freshly baked new fonts, fresh from the digital oven.

[Images: two snapshots of DJR’s tiny, tiny type specimen booklet.]

[Originally published on September 1, 2021, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as fonts, people, type designers, typography |

In October I joined Chuck Byrne to give a two-part talk about the life and work of Jack W. Stauffacher for the Society of Printers in Boston. No doubt in a normal time we would have traveled to Boston to address the members in person, but because of the pandemic the event was entirely virtual. This has its disadvantages (my connection was evidently a bit wonky, sometimes making my audio slur for a moment, though I had no way of knowing this until I listened to the recording later), but it has advantages as well: a much larger potential audience, one that was geographically dispersed although constrained by time zone. And of course the talk was recorded, so you can watch it now, well after the fact.

My part focused on Jack’s life, using the biographical essay I had written for Only on Saturday, the upcoming book from the Letterform Archive about Jack’s abstract wood-type prints. I was reading my text, rather than speaking extemporaneously, which seemed appropriate, since the book hadn’t yet been published. For the talk, I put together a selection of images that I hoped would give a visual counterpoint to the narration. Researching Jack Stauffacher’s life was a fascinating project, and finding a way to organize its many aspects and facets was a creative project of its own. But it was all in the service of telling people about Jack.

Chuck is the moving force behind the book, and in his part of the presentation he went through the book, page spread by page spread, explaining why they had chosen particular images and how they had put them together into a remarkable, highly visual volume. The design of the book is Chuck’s; he was quite sure that Jack’s approach to the design would have been different, but they were long-time friends and no doubt would have enjoyed mutually criticizing each other’s choices. It’s a beautifully designed book.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, events, people, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

At the beginning of 2020’s online virtual TypeLab, Petr van Blokland was telling the story of how TypeLab started in the early ’90s.

He described it as “a rogue version of ATypI,” which he and a few collaborators (among them Gerrit Noordzij, David Berlow, Erik van Blokland, and other ATypI designers) put together for the 1993 conference in Antwerp. It grew out of the experience in Budapest a year earlier, when the various international delegates who didn’t speak Hungarian found themselves milling around outside during a lecture on Hungarian type that was being delivered in Hungarian (naturally) without translation (unfortunately). It became apparent, Petr said, that there might be value in providing something else for people to do when they didn’t want to spend all their time in the official program. (In those days, ATypI conferences were fairly small, and they had only a single track of programming.)

After Budapest, Petr suggested to the ATypI Board of Directors that they plan some kind of informal alternative for the Antwerp conference, but the Board wasn’t willing to do that. So Petr and his friends set up their own alternative, which they dubbed TypeLab.

This was a time when digital typography was still thought of as new; it was only three years since Zuzana Licko had épaté la typoisie at Type90 with her HyperCard-based, music-enhanced presentation on fonts for the screen. Very little content about digital type had made its way into ATypI’s main program so far, and what had been included was largely theoretical. TypeLab was meant to be a sort of hands-on side-conference, an experimental laboratory, with a room full of equipment where anybody could try out the new technologies.

They managed to secure sponsorship from Agfa, which made it possible to have the computers, software, and printers all freely available.

“The room of 15 x 15 meters,” says Petr, “was divided into four quarters: a little lecture theatre of 40 chairs, a design studio with Macs and software, a ‘lounge’ where people could sit, talk, and show their sketches and drawings (note that there wasn’t anything like phones or laptops back then), and a printing department (loaded with printers, a typesetter, and copying machines).

“The board of ATypI didn’t go for the idea, so we planned to rent a space on the other side of the street. In the summer of 1993 Agfa, the main sponsor of ATypI that year in Antwerp, got wind of the idea, so Petr got invited to the Antwerp headquarters in late July. The appointment was made with the chairman of the board of Agfa, and also present was the then chairman of ATypI, who still didn’t want TypeLab to happen. But Agfa left ATypI no choice and promised the intended lunch space to TypeLab, also allowing a wish list for equipment.”

Over the course of the conference, they made their own magazine for the delegates, conceived and printed on the fly, using fonts that had been created right there just the day before. “The A3 printed newspapers, ready at breakfast for the attendees, were indeed made with the type that was created the day before. Many traditional/regular ATypI participants thought that to be impossible. Making type was something costing years, not days.”

Petr recalls a student at the Antwerp conference telling him how Adrian Frutiger had wandered into the lab, and the student had shown him how Fontographer worked – a technology that Frutiger was completely unfamiliar with at the time.

That was the first of six TypeLabs, Petr said, the last one being held at the 1996 conference in The Hague. By that time, Petr himself was on the ATypI Board, and from then on, the essence of TypeLab got incorporated into the regular conference program. It was no longer necessary as a guerrilla alternative; it had arrived.

Five years ago, TypeLab got revived as an adjunct to the Typographics conferences that were getting started at Cooper Union in New York. Organizer Cara di Edwardo had suggested that there ought to be some sort of program on the side during the main conference, so Petr re-created TypeLab for the occasion. It has been a Typographics fixture ever since, and this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, TypeLab became an online-only, virtual event (“a 72-hour marathon,” says Petr), with participants and audience from around the world.

[Image: big blue TypeLab-branded folder for conference materials, from ATypI 1993 in Antwerp.]

Categorized as events, people, tech, type designers, type history, typography |

I have continued my memoir of falling into phototypesetting and working in a small print shop in Seattle in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Franklin Press moved from Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square within a month of my starting there. Being in the heart of the city, and in the heart of Seattle’s pre-grunge alternative culture, I felt intimately connected with the life of the city. And I was learning a craft I had never suspected that I would take up.

Categorized as culture, people, type history, writing & editing |

More history, this time my own. As I worked on researching the first part of a history of ATypI, I came to realize that I myself had been around long enough that my recollections formed part of typographic history. So I’ve started writing down my memories of how I got involved with typography – a sort of typographic memoir. I came to type sideways, like everything else in my so-called career. I’ve just posted a draft of the first bit on Medium. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

Categorized as people, type history, typography, writing & editing |

“Who’s your favorite book designer?” That was the innocent-seeming question that Deborah Iaria, an Italian typographer based in London, asked me yesterday, during one of TypeThursday’s one-to-one “coffee” chats on Zoom. We had just established that we both loved designing books, so that question didn’t come out of the blue. But it’s a question I haven’t been asked very often, unlike the much more common query, “What’s your favorite typeface?” (My reply to that is usually, “It depends on what I’m going to use it for,” followed by naming a few perennial favorites like Verdigris, Dolly, Profile, and Beorcana.)

After a long pause while I pondered the question, I decided on an answer: the late San Francisco printer Jack Stauffacher. Not only had I learned a lot from Jack in person, but examples of his aesthetic and his craft, even before I met him, had taught me a lot of what I know about placing text and image on a page. And about the importance of books as carriers of culture.

But since that conversation, I have kept coming back to the question. There are lots of excellent book designers, both historical and contemporary, but which ones have influenced me the most? Which ones are my “favorites”?

From the first half of the 20th century, I would cite Jan Tschichold, W.A. Dwiggins, and Bruce Rogers as primary influences. And Jack Stauffacher’s old friend, whom unfortunately I never met: Adrian Wilson. From my own time, I greatly admire the work of the late Steve Renner, long-time art director at the University of California Press, whose spare, modern style always seemed in direct contradiction to his passion for restoring old hotrod cars.

Two more recent designers whose work I have tried to emulate are David Bullen and Tree Swenson. David Bullen established and maintained the high standards of the Berkeley-based North Point Press in the 1980s (the initial templates owed a lot to Jack Stauffacher), which was a model to me of an independent book publisher of works worth reading. Tree Swenson was the long-time publisher and designer of Copper Canyon Press, the eminent international poetry publisher in Port Townsend, Washington. After Tree left and Sam Hamill asked me to take over as house designer, it was Tree’s established standards of quality that I tried to live up to. (I was very happy when she seemed to think that I had succeeded.)

Others who leap to mind are Valerie Brewster, who later took over much of the book design for Copper Canyon and has produced many, many subtly and elegantly designed books, and Saki Mafundikwa, who was an art director at Random House before returning to Zimbabwe to found the visual/digital design school ZIVA, and who wrote and designed the seminal book Afrikan Alphabets. And John Hubbard, whom I worked with at Marquand Books in the 1990s, and who has continued to design exquisite art books ever since. No doubt I’ll think of more the moment I commit this post to pixels.

I haven’t even considered anyone from before the turn of the 20th century, and I’m not reaching beyond the Western world of printing and publishing. I’ve seen some brilliant book designs from Japan and China, but since I can’t read either language, I can’t really consider them to be influences on my ideas about text typography.

So: who’s your favorite book designer?

Categorized as book design, books, design, people, publishing |