Typographical Layout And Design

Typographical Layout and Design (1930) – Linotype Technical Schools Series – Linotype and Machinery Limited – Good Condition

Long before anybody could move a headline three pixels to the left, change a font with one click or spend forty minutes wondering why a CSS margin was not behaving, there was typography done the proper way: with metal, machinery, measurement and the ever-present possibility of losing a finger.

Typographical Layout and Design, published in 1930 as part of the Linotype Technical Schools Series by Linotype and Machinery Limited, is a fascinating practical guide to the principles of arranging type on the printed page. It comes from an era when “layout” did not mean dragging boxes around a screen but deciding, with considerable care, exactly how words, spacing, borders, illustrations and white space should work together before somebody committed the whole arrangement to metal.

The Linotype machine revolutionised printing by allowing operators to cast complete lines of type as solid metal slugs, enormously speeding up newspaper and commercial printing. This book belongs to the educational world built around that technology, teaching printers not merely how to produce type, but how to make it look good once they had produced it.

Inside is the serious business of proportion, balance, emphasis, spacing, display type, headings, decorative elements and page composition: all the things modern designers still argue about, except nobody in 1930 could solve the problem by downloading another font and hoping for the best.

It is a reminder that graphic design existed perfectly well before computers noticed it.

The principles are often surprisingly familiar. A page must guide the eye. Important material needs emphasis without shouting. Different typefaces must work together rather than starting a visual fist fight. White space is useful. Alignment matters. Decorative enthusiasm requires restraint.

In other words, approximately a century of technological progress has given us vastly more sophisticated tools with which to make exactly the same design mistakes.

As part of the Linotype Technical Schools Series, this was not produced as a coffee-table celebration of vintage printing. It was instructional material intended for people learning the trade, when typesetting was a skilled industrial occupation and printers were expected to understand both machinery and aesthetics.

That makes it particularly interesting today.

It offers a glimpse into the working culture of commercial printing at a moment when newspapers, advertisements, catalogues, posters, books and business stationery were all being produced through processes that now seem wonderfully mechanical. Letters were physical objects. Type had weight. Corrections involved considerably more effort than pressing Ctrl+Z.

Published by Linotype and Machinery Limited, the company responsible for supplying and supporting Linotype equipment in Britain, the book is also a small piece of printing-industry history in its own right. It comes from the organisation that was helping train the people who operated some of the most important machinery in twentieth-century publishing.

The book dates from 1930, placing it firmly in the golden age of hot-metal typesetting, when a printing works might contain clattering Linotype machines, molten type metal, composing rooms and skilled operators producing entire newspapers at speeds that would have seemed miraculous only a generation earlier.

This copy is in Good condition, which is rather pleasing for a technical manual approaching its centenary. It has survived the demise of hot-metal typesetting, the arrival of phototypesetting, desktop publishing, QuarkXPress, PageMaker, InDesign, Photoshop, websites, smartphones and the widespread modern belief that Comic Sans was at some point an acceptable idea.

There is no ISBN, because in 1930 the International Standard Book Number was still several decades away and publishers somehow managed to distribute books without first attaching a barcode to them.

Ideal for collectors of printing history, typography enthusiasts, graphic designers, letterpress printers, Linotype collectors, publishing historians or anybody interested in seeing how professional page design was taught before software began offering twenty-seven thousand fonts and absolutely no judgement about which ones should be used.

Also suitable for modern designers who might find it comforting — or mildly alarming — to discover that people were worrying about spacing, hierarchy and alignment nearly a hundred years before anyone invented the phrase “user experience”.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where the typography may be hot metal, the design advice may be ninety-six years old, and we still occasionally have to resist the temptation to centre everything.

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