![]() Benjamin Franklin was an admirer of Baskerville and played a prank on a critic. We first meet with the issue of readability and Caslon with the first rival to Caslon's types, those of John Baskerville. THE LONG REVIVAL: CASLON IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. In the course of explaining my goals in reviving Caslon, and quoting Lieberman and others, I have found that not only is everything typographic subject to debate, but also that readability is a particularly contentious issue.ĭid people really view Caslon as especially readable? And did that readability have anything to do with the revival of Caslon in the nineteenth century? And is the the concept of "readability" even valid? Who came up with the distinction that Lieberman makes? And the reason for my revival was to capture the readability and warmth of metal Caslon, which I felt the digital versions hadn't fully achieved. And while the virus was dormant for a long time, it led eventually to my own revival of Caslon, Williams Caslon Text (Font Bureau). Like many who had contact with him, including probably a few readers of this journal, I caught the "virus" of passion for typography from Lieberman-Uncle Ben to me-and his writings. He went to explain that readability of text is affected by not only the typeface used but also letter- and word-spacing, leading, measure, margins, quality of printing, the paper, and so on. "Readability" is the ease with which the eye can absorb the message and move along the line. 39)įurther, Lieberman explained carefully what he meant by readability, one of the vaunted characteristics of Caslon, by separating the concept of readability from legibility: "Legibility" is based on the ease with which one letter can be told from another. Caslon is the prime example of a face in which the individual letters are nothing, but the total effect is strong and honest-the reverse of an all-star performance in which each letter has such perfection that it competes to be noticed. But-it works, is highly readable, alive, with warmth and open dignity that has no pretense whatsoever. Some persons consider it the greatest type ever (they have popularized a motto, "When in doubt use Caslon") and others think it overrated, a collection of mistakes, elusively out of keeping with everything. It has been, he wrote, the most controversial face in history. Ben Lieberman, one of the founders and first President of the American Printing History Association, wrote an intriguing description of one particular typeface, Caslon. In his book Types of Typefaces (1967), J. ![]()
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