Showing posts with label Typography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Typography. Show all posts

2018-01-14

Felice Squares

A monument in the history of typography has just arrived online: the original manuscript of the first book demonstrating how to create Roman square capital letters geometrically. This is the work of Felice Feliciano, and as you can see in this extract for K and L, the letter proportion is based on the square or half-square:
Vat.lat.6852 is the original copy of Alphabetum Romanum, his treatise on the geometrical construction of Roman capital letters using the square and circle. It was digitized and issued online a few days ago. It is part of the Renaissance movement that created Antiqua, the new lettering based on Roman models.

Of course we do not now like to see a square K as wide as it is high, but it is part of the slow process of experimentation that brought microtypography to where it is today. Enjoy.

Here is my full list of new releases. eTK refers you to the Thorndike and Kibre index. I must remain brief, as my left hand is still in a cast after surgery, and typing is difficult.
  1. S.Maria.in.Via.Lata.I.45, the Evangeliary of S. Maria in Via Lata, battered, mouldy and a thousand years old. The canon tables pages are classic in style.
  2. S.Maria.in.Via.Lata.I.45.pt.A, jewelled cover and bookmarks of above, some items seemingly even older
  3. Vat.lat.168
  4. Vat.lat.207 homilies of Origen in Latin translation; NB: error in Trismegistos: not TM 67902 = Lowe, CLA Suppl. 1769 = Rome, "Vatican, Biblioteca del Vaticano Lat. 207" which is in fact Pal.lat.207 (Lorsch; 750-825).
  5. Vat.lat.339
  6. Vat.lat.434.pt.1
  7. Vat.lat.434.pt.2
  8. Vat.lat.435.pt.1
  9. Vat.lat.454.pt.2
  10. Vat.lat.527.pt.1
  11. Vat.lat.527.pt.2
  12. Vat.lat.618
  13. Vat.lat.765
  14. Vat.lat.771
  15. Vat.lat.788
  16. Vat.lat.790
  17. Vat.lat.791
  18. Vat.lat.851
  19. Vat.lat.1008.pt.1
  20. Vat.lat.1008.pt.2
  21. Vat.lat.1101
  22. Vat.lat.1162.pt.1
  23. Vat.lat.1162.pt.2
  24. Vat.lat.1162.pt.3
  25. Vat.lat.1175.pt.1, a great 12th-century work that uses stemmata to organize the teaching material: Radulfus Ardens, Speculum universale
  26. Vat.lat.1232
  27. Vat.lat.1250.pt.2
  28. Vat.lat.1304
  29. Vat.lat.1306
  30. Vat.lat.1314
  31. Vat.lat.1315
  32. Vat.lat.1568
  33. Vat.lat.1626
  34. Vat.lat.1898
  35. Vat.lat.1951.pt.1
  36. Vat.lat.1953
  37. Vat.lat.1961
  38. Vat.lat.1973
  39. Vat.lat.1985
  40. Vat.lat.1988
  41. Vat.lat.2009
  42. Vat.lat.2051
  43. Vat.lat.2053
  44. Vat.lat.2061
  45. Vat.lat.2076
  46. Vat.lat.2081
  47. Vat.lat.2116
  48. Vat.lat.2144
  49. Vat.lat.2156
  50. Vat.lat.2157 HT to @LatinAristotle: second copy of the above commentary by John of Jandun
  51. Vat.lat.2161 eTK
  52. Vat.lat.2164
  53. Vat.lat.2174
  54. Vat.lat.2197
  55. Vat.lat.2200
  56. Vat.lat.2220
  57. Vat.lat.2223
  58. Vat.lat.2270
  59. Vat.lat.2301
  60. Vat.lat.2310
  61. Vat.lat.2327
  62. Vat.lat.2329
  63. Vat.lat.2371 eTK
  64. Vat.lat.2372 eTK
  65. Vat.lat.2373 eTK
  66. Vat.lat.2387
  67. Vat.lat.2391
  68. Vat.lat.2404
  69. Vat.lat.2457, Constantine the African: Pantegni
  70. Vat.lat.5309
  71. Vat.lat.5699, a de luxe version of Ptolemy's Cosmography, dated 1469, translated from Greek to Latin by Iacobo Angelo. In the maps section, here is the Gulf of Athens. Note how each of the islands is a different colour, like confetti:
    There are wonderful idealized town views, like this of Florence: pick out the Ponte Vecchio and try to find the Duomo: in fact it is marked in historicizing fashion as Santa Reparata:
    Anthony Grafton noted for the Rome Reborn exhibition how the view on the next page showed Rome with the Castel Sant'Angelo, the Borgo and Saint Peter's at bottom right, separated from the city by the Tiber: "Within the city proper, the ancient monuments rise, without modern buildings and urban sprawl. The Pantheon, the Forum, the Capitoline and Palatine hills, and the Colosseum dominate the central space."
  72. Vat.lat.5845, the late antique Collectio Dionysiana and Collection of Cresconius in an important 10th-century South Italian composite manuscript in a Beneventan hand
  73. Vat.lat.6852, the original copy of the Alphabetum Romanum (above).
  74. Vat.lat.13152.pt.2
  75. Vat.lat.14936
  76. Vat.lat.14937
  77. Vat.lat.15294.pt.2
This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 144. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.
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2014-09-16

Line-by-line Poetry

A  nice piece in The New York Times this week points to the increasing traction that electronic formatting for poetry is gaining at small presses.

The report, Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly by Alexandra Alter, explains the macro-typography problem with poetry: lines, not paragraphs, are the fundamental unit. If electronic publishers of poetry attend to the formatting of every line, they can create beautiful presentations.

But in early e-books (and needless to say, in most web presentations of poetry), publishers rushed out poems without appropriate formatting and the results were awful. The Text Encoding Initiative and other projects developed enormously complex standards for historic poetry, but these were not appropriate for contemporary poets, because the rules were so ridiculously complicated to apply.

I worked through these issues 12 years ago in developing the poetry page of my Macro-Typography site. [Note: this shows broken at the moment in Firefox, but loads fine in IE.] Sadly, my efforts to devise a few simply standard units were too far ahead of the curve. At that time, poets did not understand the internet, and web designers did not understand poets.

I argued during the the introduction of HTML 5 that poetry should be taken into account. It wasn't.

Perhaps I was too impatient. It took centuries to establish the conventions used by typesetters in setting up poetry for printed books. It was bound to take a few years for web typographers to be understood.

The solution I propounded in 2002 is now gradually establishing itself. Poetry must be formatted in units of lines so that any spillovers when the screen is too narrow always appear indented, not flush left. The range of formats for lines must include various initial indentations, along with special cases such as the caesura and the flush-right line. Stanzas must be appropriately spaced from one another.

Alexandra Alter describes how eBook Architects, a company in Austin, Texas, is now developing virtuous web-display routines as it formats poetry professionally:
[T]he text was hand-coded and marked up semantically, so that the formal elements were tagged as lines, stanzas or deliberate indentations. When a line runs over because the screen is too small or the font is too big, it is indented on the line below — a convention that’s been observed in print for centuries.
Bravo. It's good that poets are gradually realizing that poetry can look beautiful on an electronic screen, and that Aldine blackletter on creamy white paper is not the sole way to publish. It's a pity it is still so hard to set up electronic publication that specialist companies have to be engaged to provide bespoke solutions. It ought to be part of standard HTML.
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