On Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type

I have a confession to make: I have never managed to get more than fifty pages into Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, aka the typographer’s bible. I’m not sure why; the writing is fine and the subject matter is fascinating, but for some reason I pick up the book and never manage to finish. By contrast, I received Goeffrey Dowding’s Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type as a Christmas gift and read the whole thing in double-quick time. It is neither a well-known nor particularly lauded book on typography; there are only six reviews on Amazon (versus Element’s seventy-six), most of which are written with the caveat that Finer Points really is just the finer points, possibly a worthy addendum to your design library but then again, maybe not.

image via typography.com

I disagree. Finer Points is picky, stodgy, snobbish and inadvertently hilarious, probably one of the most entertaining books you could read on the subject of typographic composition. Unfortunately for everybody, the current (used!) running price is $80, a rather prohibitive dollar a page. Accordingly, I’ve transcribed a few quotable gems from Dowding to tide you over until the next printing. (The headlines are mine, but italics are his—Dowding was rather fond of italics.)

On the importance of letter-spacing in creating an even texture in body type

‘The colour, or degree of blackness of a line is improved tremendously by close word-spacing. A carefully composed text page appears as an orderly series of strips of black separated by horizontal channels of white space. Conversely, in a slovenly setting the tendency is for the page to appear as a grey & muddled pattern of isolated spots, this effect being caused by the over-widely separated words…But whenever word-spacing is increased beyond the thin space care must be taken not to increase it to the point where the line ceases to be a unit.’

On those pesky Modern fonts

‘In faces of this modern group (Bodoni, Walbaum, etc.), the extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes, and the weakness of their hairlines and unbracketed serifs tend to dazzle and tire the eye. Neither these, nor the sans serifs, are really suitable as designs for continuous reading…Even when the short pieces of copy are set in faces the greatest care must be exercised in arranging the settings—measures must not be too wide and the lines must always be leaded generously.’

On hyphenation, and why it is to be embraced

‘Many books have been set without the division of a single word. But it is obvious that consistently close and even spacing cannot be achieved—except in the most unusual circumstances—if the typesetter has resolved never to divide words. Such works would rarely, if ever, be of any typographic distinction…It is a most unfortunate fact that many apprentice compositors are still being taught that to have more than two successive line breaks, i.e. lines ending with a divided word, is bad practice. This kind of training encourages the easy, slovenly solution: it is infinitely preferable to have a number of break lines succeeding each other than to have widely-word spaced lines.’

On the ampersand in body text, and why it is to be embraced

‘In hand-composition the use of the short ‘and’, as in this sign (&) is sometimes called, is completely justified in all cases where the considerations of good setting demand it, that is, when the spacing of the line, and consequently of the panel, column, or page, is improved by its use. By setting an ampersand in place of ‘and’ a little more than the width of a normal letter is saved, and this apparently small saving often makes it possible for another word or part of a word to be accommodated in a line. Frequently in ephemeral printing the use of an ampersand saves the copywriter from being asked to alter his copy in order to tighten the spacing of a gappily spaced line, or to avoid an awkward word division.’***

On those pesky quotation marks

‘The use of quotation marks never improves a text setting. Whenever the meaning is clear without them they should be omitted…If their absence is likely to cause confusion then use single quotes only, never double ones, except when a quotation appears within a quotation…Double quotation marks introduce an excessive amount of whitespace into the lines however carefully they are set and so destroy the even color of the lines, and, if there are many of them, of the page.’

On altering awkward punctuation

‘But as type bodies increase in size, the number of punctuation marks that it is necessary to watch multiplies. Beware of using over-large quotation marks, e.g. those designed for use with Gill Extra Bold or Ultra Bodoni. They are gross, and like most gross things, ugly. If quotation marks must appear in these settings in these types they should generally be set two sizes smaller than the body size of the words they enclose…Often it is possible to omit quotation marks altogether in headlines without any obscuration of sense & with an immense improvement in the appearance of the setting. This improvement is especially notable in fonts with extremely ugly quotation marks, e.g. in Rockwell & other members of the Egyptian family of faces.’

On underlining

‘Underlining as a method of emphasizing a word or phrase in a displayed setting is a crude relic of Victorian typography.’

It is worth noting that a lot of what Dowding recommends is virtually impossible with even the most advanced layout programs (e.g., you cannot usually automatically set letterspacing only within a word), much less CSS (for an overview of the sad state of hyphenation, you can visit The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web). This does not mean that these rules are not worth knowing, only that to replicate them will take at least as much time and care on the part of the digital compositor as the physical.

A few things are genuinely impossible, such as maintaining font fidelity on web pages to the point that one can reasonably expect when an ampersand substitution would be warranted. But this is what technology is for; and as it improves and digital typography comes into its own, we can hope that such arrangements will be automatically accounted for.

* Most.**

**Okay all. Every single person.

***If you are like me, you are probably reading this bit with some incredulity. How on earth is the ampersand to be read comfortably in body text? However I only noticed the ampersands for about the first five pages, and after that read them as smoothly as any other word.

—Timoni