recent
progress on
Harry Carter,
Typographer
A tribute to an unsung English typographer, by Martyn Thomas, John A Lane, and Anne Rogers
Late 2004
Along came 1 April and the chance to switch from a textbook that I have been writing (my other life) to the two big projects of 2004: this new and much-needed book on Harry Carter, and our exciting new title on Venetian brickwork (see below). I still had all the type - over sixty galleys - from Stanley Morison & 'John Fell' which I printed last year and it was time to start taking it back to Stan Lane at Gloucester Typesetting who will be setting and casting the type for Harry Carter, Typographer.
Carrying twenty galleys of type up to his workshop from the car was the most exercise I had had for a while and required a breather and mug of tea before returning home on the first of the three trips that I shall have to make to return all the metal. It was also chance to talk about the Carter book and its typesetting. I had been thinking about the typeface for some time, wanting something 20th century in feel and appropriate to Carter. I had first thought of Dante and was close to fixing on it when I saw the piece on John Dreyfus in Matrix 23 from John Randle. It was printed in Romulus and looked lovely. Romulus was originally designed for the Enschedé foundry by Jan van Krimpen and later released by Monotype. It has a sloped roman in place of a true italic, so its 'italics' are rather wide on the body but equally they stand out less than a true italic would. Carter knew Van Krimpen and I'm sure its clean lines would have appealed to Carter. My challenge is to get its qualities onto paper. Stan has now acquired a brand new Romulus diecase - the 15 by 17 set of individual matrices for the typeface - and this book will be the first casting from it. On my second trip with type metal I handed over the copy and went through it with him, discussing the finer points of layout.
Getting the text finalised has been another big challenge. The book is in two parts: the biography and the bibliography. The biography runs to about sixty pages of text, and copy-editing that has been a fairly standard affair. Several people including spouses have given it a going over. The question of when to capitalise 'van/Van' in Dutch names has been a sticking point: authoritative Dutch sources contradict the Oxford Guide to Style which has otherwise been our bible! The bibliography runs to around 200 entries. John Lane collected all the original material, and Anne Rogers and Martyn Thomas have scrupulously checked and painstakingly organised it. John did not restrict himself to Carter's many writings but also collated reviews of Carter's work, and all these reviews appear against the works concerned. Getting the 30pp of the bibliography ready for typesetting has been 'interesting' as we have faced up to all the usual questions of how best to present information which can be looked at from so many different angles. Our solution has included an extensive Index which provides several routes to finding particular works in the bibliography.
We have collected a dozen photographs covering Carter's life, a number having been kindly loaned by the Carter family for the purpose, and others from Oxford University Press of course - Carter's last job was as Archivist at the Press, a role specially created for him in order to have him on board to help Stanley Morison on his great book on John Fell and his types. These have all gone to the Cloister Press near Cambridge for scanning prior to having them separately printed as we did with the photos in Stanley Morison & 'John Fell'. I lay out the photos on a single B2 sheet and then have about 300 of these printed and cut down to yield the tip-ins. (Something apparently as simple as this still has its pitfalls: whichever way the photos are tipped into the book, the grain of the paper they are printed on must go in the same direction as the grain of the paper they are tipped onto, ie parallel to the spine of the book.) Carter also designed some type borders, a Curwen paper, and an 'emerald' type for printing Bibles - we hope to represent all of these in one form or another in the book, to demonstrate the breadth of Carter's output.
Our plans for the de luxe copies are also coming on well. The original thought was to have a portfolio of separate items in the same way that we did for The Fell Revival and Stanley Morison & 'John Fell'. But during their research, Martyn Thomas and Anne Rogers have come across a number of pieces of unpublished writing by Carter and this seems a good opportunity to publish them. So the de luxe copies will probably contain an extra case-bound volume with a selection of these pieces in them.
All in all the book is shaping up very well. When originally conceived it was expected to run to about 60pp, but, as is the way with these things, it now looks more like 120pp! As a result the price has also had to be raised by a third and at the moment our expectation is that standard copies will be around £80 (E135, US$160) and de luxe copies £160 (E270, US$300).
