The Crystal Goblet. Sixteen essays on typography. Selected and edited by Henry Jacob

Beskrivning

The Sylvan Press, London 1955. First edition. 221 pages. 8vo. Yellow dust jacket over red cloth boards. Dust jacket worn and with loss, chips, tears and creases. Nowadays hard to find title.

 Beatrice Warde (1900–1969) was a writer, lecturer, historian and expert on typography, as well as marketing manager for Monotype. The Crystal Goblet is a collection of 16 of her essays. Initially she wrote under the pseudonym ‘Paul Beaujon’ – in this excerpt from a 1959 interview with Warde she explains why:

“Well, I wanted a pen name. I wasn’t quite sure at that time (which is a long time ago) that women would be taken quite as respectfully. I thought that if I was going to have a pen name, I might as well have a man, and I took a Frenchman’s at that, to make it a little more mysterious.”

The key essay in the book, and the one which gives it its title, is ‘The Crystal Goblet or Printing should be invisible’, in which she argues for a quiet and unobtrusive form of typography, revealing rather than obscuring meaning.

“The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of ‘colour’, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is bad type. Our subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hair spaces — these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.”