Confusion notwithstanding, the typographer as he is most generally understood is responsible—whether or not he does all of the work himself—for the appearance of the printed page, and his work is best seen in the several examples of the printed page that are used to illustrate the present article.

The typographic page may be considered in terms of two aesthetic qualities. The first of these has been called “atmosphere,” “feel,” “impress,” “sense,” and other similar terms. It is easier felt than defined, and it depends in large measure on such things as the size of the block of type, its placement on the page, the kinds of display letters used for titles, running heads, and subheads, and the size of the margins—all elements that in the hands of a competent typographer create an expectation regarding the contents (possibly even the purpose) of the page and lead to a sense of the time of its production, its seriousness, and its function.

The second aesthetic quality is that of colour, the darkness or lightness of the block of type sensed somehow as a whole rather than as a collection of individual letter forms with substantive meanings. Colour is the result of letter shapes, distances between letters and between words, the amount of space left between lines, the inking of the type, the printing process employed in making the impression on paper, and the paper itself.

Of all elements the design of the letters is, in the dominant view, the most important. It is important that early typography was in fact overtly engaged in the explicit search for typefaces that would mechanically reproduce the written scripts in which, before the invention of printing, books had been prepared. For most of its life since the invention of printing with movable type in the mid-15th century, typography in the West has been dominated by three type families—roman, italic, and black letter (see below). All are easily recognizable as refined and regularized versions of letter styles first developed and standardized by scribes. The debt of sans serif, more a subclass than a family, is apparent but less unequivocal.

To divide the several thousand typefaces that have existed since Gutenberg into three major families is only the grossest type of classification, and historians of typography, like teachers of typography, have found it useful to set up other classifications. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, they have not found it possible to agree on a system of classification. The variety of proposals has been so bewildering as to defeat one of the first purposes of classification. Some have concentrated on the influence of seminal workers in the field and talk of “Caslon’s,” “Bodoni’s,” etc. Others have concentrated on the major uses or types of literature from which various dominant types have come and talk, for example, of Humanistic faces. Other systems have employed nomenclatures that emphasize the early manuscript models from which a face evolved or a national influence. In attempts to meet a growing need for standards that can be applied more rigorously in legal and commercial and technical bibliographical uses, some countries and some craft associations have tried to develop classification schemes based on precise, in some cases almost mathematical, descriptions of the various elements of letter shapes. These schemes are not as yet worked out to the satisfaction of all concerned and are matters of some controversy, even among those who applaud the aims.

The system that has enjoyed the longest general favour and seems to be about as useful as any other divides typefaces into four classifications. Unfortunately, though the classifications are based as much on differences in letter styles as on chronology, the names given each suggest a temporal alignment and one that is, at first glance, confusing.

The first of these is called in most places old face—though Americans sometimes call it old style. In general, old faces were largely those types developed from c. 1722 to c. 1763 (dates of William Caslon and John Baskerville). Their letter forms had marked affinities with the penned letter styles of the scribes: they tended to squareness, there was little contrast between the thick and thin strokes, the stresses (the thickest part of the curves in a letter) were heavy and tilted or slanted, and the serifs tended to be full or thick and had brackets—gracefully rounded curves where they joined the letter body proper.

The second classification is usually described as transitional and, as its name suggests, came more or less between—and had letter styling midway between—old face and modern.

So-called modern types were produced between c. 1788 (when Giambattista Bodoni introduced the typeface that retains his name) and approximately 1820, when type design almost everywhere went into a major decline. Modern faces in general share characteristics resulting from the engraver’s tool rather than the pen. There is a marked contrast between the thick and thin strokes of the letter, the thins in particular being almost exaggeratedly thin, and the change from thick to thin is sudden and pronounced; serifs tend to be thinner and somewhat longer, and the stresses are less pronounced and are vertical rather than tilted. The effect is that of a letter less square, more up and down, than old-face letters, with lines more sharply defined.

The classification called old style or, in America, modernized old style is reserved for revivals of old faces undertaken by contemporary type designers, a practice typified by the important work of one of England’s truly prestigious type designers, Stanley Morison. It is necessary to establish a special classification for such types because in each case the modern reworking, while it owed much to the original, was in fact sufficiently different to be a new creation in its own right.

It is worth pointing out once more that typefaces are assigned to one or the other classification on the basis of the style in which their letters are drawn and not—despite their time-oriented designations—by the year of their creation.

Finally, and although this is not the place for a detailed history of the evolution of the written letter forms on which printing depends, it is significant that models for all three major type families were in use before the invention of printing by movable type: in England and Germany, a handwriting that was symmetrical, elongated, spiky, magnificently decorative, and difficult to read, not unlike certain parts of letters called today Old English, German script, and Gothic, was to be the origin of black type; in Italy and Spain, a free, open, square, uncluttered writing, not too far from the letter forms regularized by a decree of Charlemagne in the late 8th century, is recognizable today as the seed source of roman type; and a slanted, cursive, more hurried form of the same—from which it evolved by chancery scribes whose work required speed in handwriting—is easily seen to be the origin of italic.

The ready availability of serviceable letter models freed typography from the necessity of creating its own prototypes and left it able to spend its creative impulses in other ways. So well did it succeed that, within the first few decades after Gutenberg, it had brought forth almost every major development that it was to contribute and, in fact, had established itself so well that it may be fair to say that, until the 20th century, the art was a static one for all but the first 50 years of its existence. Further, the fact that the art form could take its basic ingredients from existing sources gave it a stability that it would not otherwise have had. Since it was unnecessary to wait while various producers in various countries came to agreement on which letter shapes to adopt or what reading conventions to employ, the typographer was enabled to get on with the work of overseeing the printing of books for distribution on a scale never before envisioned. The influence on the Renaissance was of incalculable importance if, indeed, it was not one of cause and effect.