Typography Description Class Segment

        The paper used in books is super important--no paper, no book--but the type and its inked impressions are what make the book more than just a stack of paper.  For that, we must practice distinguishing one type font from the others.  For a type description vocabulary guide appropriate to Roman types, click here.  "Roman" fonts, so-called because late-fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italian printers pioneered the use of these (to us) modern, rounded, relatively unadorned fonts, are by far the easiest for us to read and describe.  Those fonts imitated the handwriting of scribes in the very early, "Carolingian" period of manuscript book making ("era of Charlemagne," ca. 700s-800s).  The new/old imitations of Carolingian scribal hands created the open, easily read "Humanist" manuscript hands that came to dominate Early Modern handwriting.  Roman type, anyone can read and most people can distinguish from similar fonts.    Gothic type is a more complex way to make the shapes of the alphabet, but they read it quite easily until around 1700 in England and France, and the Germans did not abandon it until World War II.  (And yes, there's a story there.)  Those earlier "Gothic" fonts, beginning with those made for Gutenberg's press around 1450/1451, were the first moveable type characters made for printing.  They owe their shape to printers' attempt to imitate the manuscript hands of fifteenth-century scribes who were making the manuscript books with which early printed books competed.  Because there were relatively few printers in the first fifty years of hand-press printing (the "Incunable Period"), it was possible to identify a large number of them by the unique shapes of their letters.  This is the link to Conrad Haebler's "M" page which identifies and assigns numbers to almost all the known Gothic fonts in Europe based on the characteristic way they made the capital letter "M": http://www.ndl.go.jp/incunabula/e/chapter2/chapter2_01_02.html   This is a the link to a Gothic type font identification exercise which you can use to help train your eyes to make out subtle differences in the way Gothic letters were formed by different type makers:  http://www.ndl.go.jp/incunabula/chapter2/identify/identify.html