Jan van Krimpen, A letter to Philip Hofer on certain problems connected with the mechanical cutting of punches. A facsimile reproduction with an introduction and commentary by John Dreyfus (Studies in the history of calligraphy and printing No. 4). Cambridge (Mass.), Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Harvard College Library/Boston, David R. Godine, 1972, 8°, 102 pp., $15.00.

Jan van Krimpen, the Dutch typographer (1892–1958), had problems concerning the principles of his work as a type designer which ‛haunted’ him—as he wrote—for many years. They centered in his desire to retain sprightliness in mechanically cut types without resorting to dishonest means.

The elements that lend sprightliness to a type are, according to van Krimpen and many others, those little irregularities which are the natural side-effect of any handwork, be it the hand-cutting of steel punches or the hand-drawing of type designs. Hand-cutting is too expensive and takes too much time nowadays to be economically feasible in large-scale type production; besides, there are simply not enough handcutters available. Mechanical cutting is necessary. Consequently, the characteristics of handwork would only appear to be obtainable today by letting the machine copy hand-drawn designs. But here van Krimpen’s notions of honest means put an obstacle in his path. ‛Honest’ is defined by him as ‛in accordance with the nature of the tool used’, and he considered irregularities as alien to the nature of mechanical punchcutting. Hence the problems: good, sprightly types can only be made by hand-cutting; mechanical cutting is inevitable but its logic is to produce regular, lifeless types; if we were to force the machine, against its nature, to copy hand-work, could any good come from such basic dishonesty?

Van Krimpen saw no real solution. His friends Morison and Mardersteig had resorted to a compromise for certain important new types during the ’twenties: if the handcutter could not make all the punches required for a fount, he could at least make a few pilot punches to try out the essential features and dimensions of the projected design. The results could then guide the draughtsmen in the making of working drawings for the patterns or templates of the punchcutting machines. Failing a handcutter, van Krimpen proposed that the draughtsmen of the mechanical production method should interpret the type designer’s drawings with the eye, so to speak, of the experienced handcutter.

The compromise of the pilot punches is burdened by the necessity of modifying the basic design to the specific requirements of each size of a book face. In order to maintain optical identity of the design throughout a range of sizes, while giving each size its optimal legibility, strength and grace, subtle variations have to be applied to the original drawings. For the handcutter, who has to create each size on its own, this is the natural way of working. On the pantograph punchcutting machine, on the other hand, a single set of patterns can be used, in principle, to cut all sizes. Because of the considerable costs of drawing and pattern-making this is in fact sometimesdone, with a consequent disregard for the specific requirements of the various sizes. In today’s photo-typesetting machines this has even become the rule, various lenses producing many sizes from a single set of alphabet negatives; it is one of the qualitative drawbacks of this technique. In the lead-casting techniques, however, different patterns are usually made for groups of sizes, preferably groups of no more than a few sizes in the case of book types, which are highly sensitive in this respect. If the handcutter were required to make pilot punches for each size, the price for the resulting improvement in quality would soar. In fact, the idea of having recourse to the handcutter was given up by Morison and Mardersteig in the ’thirties, owing to their having changed their opinion as to its usefulness and also to considerations of costs, and to the scarcity of skilled craftsmen.

In his lifetime van Krimpen could rely on the assistance of Enschedé’s experienced handcutter P.H. Rädisch, but he realized, of course, that the days of this craft were numbered and that the logic of mechanical production properly required a different solution. The problem haunted him so much, that although he was not by nature a prolific writer, he committed his thoughts to paper on several occasions during his last years. Of these writings, one gained a wide circulation, being published (under the title On designing and devising type, 1957) by The Typophiles in New York as their 32nd Chap Book, as well as under several other imprints. It was preceded by the study reviewed here, which was finished in November 1955,but not published.

This article, in the form of a letter, was commissioned by Philip Hofer, founder and former curator of theDepartment of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and patron of many activities on behalf of the graphic arts. The letter is reproduced in facsimile with an introduction and commentary by John Dreyfus.

Mr. Dreyfus was particularly qualified for this task. As a friend of van Krimpen’s and his ‛official’ biographer (The Work of Jan van Krimpen, 1952) he writes with thorough knowledge, sympathy and admiration about van Krimpen as a person, and as the typographical adviser of the Monotype Corporation with full expertise about the technical side of his subject. The task, however, proved to be a difficult one. In the first place. Van Krimpen wrote in a circuitous and cumbersome way—Mr. Dreyfus is justified in using these qualifications—and in a defective English which made it necessary to make the contents digestible even for the interested and typographically informed reader. Secondly—and this was the greatest problem—van Krimpen’s difficulties arose from a few fundamental misconceptions. His views could not go unannotated and unchallenged.

These considerations led Mr. Dreyfus to present the text in facsimile, written in van Krimpen’s beautiful, clear hand—in itself a joy to behold—with a résumé of its contents which translates its main points in simple, understandable terms, plus a critical introduction and commentary; a select bibliography of the problems in question, a handlist of writings by van Krimpen, a full rendering of the letter from Stanley Morison to van Krimpen of 5 March 1956 (which the latter quoted partially and not quite correctly in his Typophiles book) and a number of illustrations pertaining to points raised in the main text.

The book has been impeccably produced by Joh. Enschedé (Sem Hartz and Bram de Does signing for it) with van Krimpen’s Spectrum type on a greenish rag paper of special manufacture, which closely resembles the Barcham Green handmade paper on which van Krimpen wrote the original letter. As far as its outward appearance is concerned, it will be read with ease and pleasure.

The text itself is of historical importance, because it throws light, greatly aided by Mr. Dreyfus’s commentary, on questions which interested a few great typographers—Updike, Rogers, Mardersteig and Morison—to a certain extent during the ’twenties, and which vexed their friend van Krimpen for another quarter of a century after they ceased to bother about it; that is, at the very end of the sixty years during which hand-punchcutters worked next to mechanical punchcutters and also at the start of the period in which photocomposition is beginning to supersede composition in metal types for which punches must be made. To say that it is ‛much ado about nothing’ would be going too far. But the text leaves us wondering what caused a man of van Krimpen’s stature to remain entangled in a set of contradictions and misconceptions for so long.

As Mr. Dreyfus rightly remarks, van Krimpen wanted to have it both ways: ‛he wanted the operator of the punchcutting machinery to produce a result which was accurate up to a point, but interpretative to an important degree.’ Similarly, one might add, he wanted the handcutter to be no more than the executive hand of the designer while acting at the same time as the independent craftsman who uses his experienced eye to modify the design to obtain the right effect on paper in each size. Mr. Dreyfus refers to van Krimpen’s curiously ambivalent attitude towards Rädisch, whom he refused to mention by name in the publications about his types, taking the credit for them strictly for himself, at the same time as he extolled the unique contribution of the experienced craftsman, albeit under provision of constant control by the creative designer.

Van Krimpen who wanted to be no more than a coolly reasoning technician, a mere skilled ‛arranger’, and who loathed intensely being associated with artistry, imagination and romantic sentiment, was actually a romantic artist in this respect, with the aristocratic feelings of superiority that go with it. The Hofer letter reveals, surprisingly, how he regarded the first sketch of the artist as the embodiment of the creative act. Though still ambiguous as to the final execution, it is already the really new form contributed to mankind. As a proof three stages of a type design are shown: first the sketch, secondly the finished drawing, both penciled in outline, and thirdly the final drawing, solid in black ink. Van Krimpen finds the quality deteriorating from one to three. Actually, as most readers will agree, the second stage is the best except for a few minor points, and stage three is simply a defective rendering of it in many important details. He also quotes Michelangelo’s Pietà di Palestrina (unfinished) as being far more satisfactory than his Madonna col Figlio (San Lorenzo, Florence, finished).

The final execution of the sketch, the dirty work, then, is a matter for a man lower in the social hierarchy of creativity; it is a job for the toiling handcutter, who does have the peculiar skills of eye and hand acquired from the venerable tradition of his craft, but who needs guidance from the Master to prevent him misinterpreting the grand design. In the preceding book review (of Morison’s biographies) I went into this concept of tradition. There the mistrust of Morison, Mardersteig and van Krimpen towards the ‛engineers’ (e.g. Morris Benton and Frank Pierpont) is mentioned too.

This mistrust was based on the natural tendency of the engineers to make identical elements in the various characters of the alphabets conform to standard measurements and shapes, such as thicknesses of strokes, serif formation, total height of comparable characters etc., in order to facilitate drawing and measurement for dimensional control in cutting. This regularizing will abolish the irregularities of handwork (in hand-drawn designs or in copies of handcut punches). However, if these are recognized as intentional, there is no reason why such irregularities should not be respected. The engineers were also reproached for the lack of crispness in their cutting and for their defective adaptation of the basic design to the various sizes, but these shortcomings were again not due to mechanical cutting as such either; they were the result of policy decisions.

In fact, the nature of the machine does not necessitate regularity; the machine can do whatever it is told to do. Nor does handcutting invariably include a pretty irregularity; it is the will of the craftsman which decides. The most lifeless, regular types ever seen were handcut: the later 19th-century didones. One of the most crisp and sprightly modern types was entirely produced by the mechanical punchcutting routine: Dwiggins’s Caledonia type.

Finally, the question of honesty. This has played a considerable role in craft and industrial design during the last hundred years. I will not question its usefulness as a guide to finding the right attitude towards design. But if the form of a product is only honest if it agrees with the nature of the material, of the tools and of its function, there is still the question of what those natures are. A strict, ascetic introvert will not give the same definition as the easy-going, pleasure-loving extravert. As to the material properties: lead can be cast into any shape; the pantograph engraving machine can reproduce any design, and the function of typefaces can range from providing recognizable word patterns to catching attention, conveying moods, providing decorative patterns or setting the key for anticipatory readers’ attitudes. Furthermore it can be argued that honesty should also be observed in respect of the personality of the designer and the wishes of the reading public: a designer should not be asked to betray his convictions or personality and the consumer should not be forced to swallow a design he does not like or need. In other words: within wide limits it is possible to define honesty according to individual preferences. It is by no means self-evident what striving for honesty prescribes for us in a given case.

Van Krimpen was undoubtedly sincere when he professed to see no solution. His difficulties stemmed, in the last resort, from the fact that he shirked his responsibilities. On the one hand he exaggerated in his romantic notions the virtues of the craftsman wrestling with the hard metal, thereby producing sprightliness, and of the ‛secret’ skills that only the experienced craftsman, reared in a tradition, can acquire in judging the specific needs of the various sizes. All this while humbly striving to give a faithful rendering of the artist’s master drawing. On the other hand he refused to exercise his own judgment in the matter, which he could have done by patiently and laboriously drawing and redrawing for mechanical cutting until the result had all the sprightliness and specific suitability for size that he wished. Rädisch’s judgment was no better than that which van Krimpen could have undoubtedly acquired, had he taken the trouble to sit down and do at least the fundamental part of the dirty work himself.

G. Willem Ovink
(trans. R.)

A tip of the Typochapeau to Paul Moxon for his aiding & abetting us with imagery for this post.