Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. Well, the other day, I was going through the Museum of Printing and looking at some of the artwork for linotype typefaces.

The Museum has drawings for every glyph, for every font ever done in the United States for the linotype machine. They were done on these large sheets of paper, in pencil, and that’s where they delineated the character, which was then traced in a pantograph in order to create a brass pattern plate, which they traced in another pantograph to create the punch which then made the matrix.

Now, these drawings were done for hot metal originally, so they were big so they could come down and keep the quality when they were very small. But the little red markings that on there is when they adapted these drawings for the linofilm - their first photographic typesetting machine. And so they made certain changes in either with values or positioning.

In this particular case, they moved the character a few points, changed the width value slightly. These particular drawings were done in 1976, but we have some that go back to 1890 or so.

Now the reason I bring this up is because the other day I read that Linotype Imaging had just acquired the type division of Bit Stream for $15 million. And I thought to myself, well type was big then, type is big now. We take it for granted, don’t we?

In the old days you bought it from typographers or printers and you paid a premium for it because someone who knew what they were doing did it. Now most of us do it ourselves and many of us don’t know what we’re doing to begin with.

I mean, you can do something like this where you pick certain letters and put them in different fonts, that’s very creative and very interesting, but because we have so many fonts available, people mix them all in the same job. And yet, some of the most beautiful work that was ever done was done in one font, in perhaps one size.

Type is something that became mundane when we moved into desktop publishing. At that point, the graphic designer, artist production person was now responsible for something that a professional used to do, someone who understood the differences in the use of, for instance, certain footnote symbols or M-fractions and N-fractions, knew how to create fractions if they didn’t have them, by the way.

So we, again, have taken it all for granted and as a result, I think the state of typography has gone down. Now, some people say well with more creativity in typography than ever before and that’s great, that’s true. We can do more things that we ever did before. You can have ever point size in three decimal increments. You can expand and condense and slant and back slant type to your heart’s content. You can make it reverse, you can make it positive, you can change its orientation. You can make it into a graphic.

We never had those abilities before; we had type as type, and type was its own world. And we did not take it for granted because it was expensive. Every one of the matrices that was made from one of these drawings, it’s over 31 cents. And you needed somewhere between 800 and 1,000 of them in the magazine in order to set a reasonable amount of type.

So as I went back through these drawings and thought about how Bit Stream was sold for $50 million, I said to myself, “typography is a good thing.”

And that’s my opinion.