Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was born in Brighton in 1882 and apprenticed as an architect of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1900. He married Ethel Mary Moore in 1904 and, three years later, joined a community of artist craftsmen in Ditchling, Sussex, where he did some printing and illustration. He left Ditchling in 1924 and lived at Capel-y-ffin in mid-Wales. No type designed by Gill was cut until 1925 (Perpetua) and most of his work in type design was done in collaboration with The Monotype Corporation. He was also a sculptor, and his work in this medium can still be admired in many places, such as the Ariel and Prospero above the main doors of the BBC in Portland Place, and the stations of the cross in Westminster Cathedral. He had three daughters, Petra, Joanna and Felicity. In 1928 he moved to High Wycombe where he continued as a stone cutter and sculptor, and, for a short time, ran a commercial printing business with his son-in-law, René Hague. He wrote extensively on many subjects, and particularly about industrial design and craftsmanship. He died on 17 November 1940.

One of the more risky routes to immortality is to give one’s name to a typeface. In Eric Gill’s case it has caused misunderstandings about his work as a type designer and about the man himself. Gill Sans is the most widely known and widely used typeface in the history of typography. While it has not withstood the effects of time and changes of fashion it has never, in its multiplicity of sizes, weights and variants, really disappeared from print. Gill’s original sans-serif spawned some 36 derivatives, not all of them designed by Gill and some rejected outright by him. The sans remains, however, Gill’s most visible achievement in the field of type design, yet it is by no means typical of his style of lettering, nor representative of his typographical outlook.

Both Gill and Edward Johnston were approached to design a simple, geometrically-based alphabet for use throughout the London Underground railway. It was Johnston, a tutor of Gill and already well-known as a lettering artist and calligrapher, who did the job and, as can still be seen, did it well. There is no doubt that Gill Sans was inspired by, and even based upon, the Johnston letters, though it is no slavish imitation of them, and Gill has himself pointed out that the Johnston sans was designed primarily for station names, notices and the like, where as his own sans-serif was conceived as a printing type. The differences are instructive.

Gill Sans

Gill Sans is dear and spare, but not a ‛mechanical’ letter, as it has sometimes been called. To evaluate it now one has to remember the generally low quality of typography, mixed faces and often debased Romans and blackletter types, which characterised most 19th century jobbing printing. Gill was already established as a letter cutter in stone and wood when, unwillingly at first, he was persuaded by Stanley Morison, then typographic adviser to The Monotype Corporation, to tackle type design. Gill had strong views on the virtues of working with one’s hands and the dangers inherent in mechanisation. Herein lies one of the many contradictions between what Gill preached and what he practised for though his first typeface, Perpetua, is unquestionably the product of a sensitive and highly-skilled artist-craftsman, it could not, any more than his other type designs, have come into being as it did without the mechanisation of typefounding and typesetting at Monotype, or have been so widely used without the mechanisation of printing. Gill made several attempts to resolve this dichotomy, none of them very convincing; he berated mass production, yet type is mass produced; he despised commercialism, yet his sans was the biggest commercial success of any type family; he disclaimed any knowledge of typography yet, within seven years of doing so, wrote a book about it.

Perpetua

Gill was 42 when he resisted Morison’s request for an article on typography for The Fleuron, saying that it was not his line of country. He never cut a punch, and though, when eventually he started to work with Monotype, he was conscientious and serious about type design, all his typefaces were products of a fruitful liaison with experts in the typographic field. This is not to suggest that Gill does not deserve full credit for what he did; but it indicates differences between the free, and uniquely personal, work of the letter cutter, and the more disciplined, mechanically constrained and technically demanding task of designing for metal type to be produced in a range of weights and sizes. The latter can rarely, if ever, be done by one man working in isolation, and this was the first thing Gill learned.

Type design was a proportionately small part of Gill’s creative output. He learned it as he went along from suggestions and criticisms by Morison and others who knew how to get the best from his skills; but he was never a man to be driven, and there is a lot of Gill in the fine Roman types he designed. He found quickly the difference between an incised letter and a typeface intended to be inked and impressed on paper; yet it could be said that Perpetua retains more of the characteristics of an incised letter than of a typeform and may be thought by some a little too obviously elegant and  idiosyncratic for a book face.

Joanna trial page for Gills Essay on Typography 1931 (Monotype)

This could not be said of Joanna, which shows for a book face, Gill’s growing confidence in type design. It was drawn in 1930 as a type for limited editions, and reasserted, after the sans experiment, Gill’s determination not to work for machines. ‛Machines’ he wrote, ‛can do practically anything. The question isn’t what they can do but what they should.’ The jewel-like italic is what Morison was always saying an italic should be—a ‛sloped roman’ and not a cursive letter. The typeface was first cast in only two sizes, 8 point and 12 point, and did not become available to the printing industry at large until 1958. It is still hard to find, in spite of its honest simplicity as a book face, as l discovered when I specified Joanna for my own book on Gill (Eric Gill, the man who loved letters; Muller, 1973).

Experimental line block of Solus for Monotype

Of Gill’s other Roman type designs there is much to say but little to see. Solus somewhat resembles Perpetua, which it followed in 1929, but is really a light Egyptian. It has been overshadowed by other, equally dignified, Egyptian style alphabets, more accessible to designers. Aries is a private press type and bears some resemblance to Morison’s Times New Roman. It looks well in its larger sizes which show its light, yet generous, character.

The Aries type (Stourton Press)

Jubilee (Stephenson Blake) 72, 60 & 48 point sizes

Jubilee was calligraphically inspired and, in my view, something of a failure, as have been many types where the freedom of the performed letter is constricted by the essential regularity of a cast type. It was originally called Cunard and was intended mainly as a display type—Gill’s only essay in this classification outside some Gill Sans derivatives. It was revised many times before appearing (and promptly disappearing) in 72, 60 and 48 point. Jubilee should not be confused with the type of that name designed by Walter Tracy for Linotype.

Buynan with Perpetua Italic chapter heading

Bunyan is one of Gill’s most attractive text types and his correspondence with Monotype during its drafting provides an insight into the painstaking analytical approach he made to type design. It appeared as a ‛private’ type from Monotype in 1934 and later reappeared as Pilgrim ‛a typeface based on a design by Eric Gill’ from Linotype, with an italic which the original did not possess. The Golden Cockerel type was another private press face designed by Gill for Robert Gibbings of the Golden Cockerel Press. It is a weighty, opulent Roman in the Perpetua tradition. Apart from Perpetua Greek, which appeared in 1929, and is an interesting and successful attempt to design a ‛modern’ Greek typeface which attained scant recognition in academic circles, these are Gill’s entire output in the field of type design. It is impossible, in the space available here, to examine the types in any detail, but it must be said that, apart from their intrinsic merits, their influence over the design of printing types has been considerable and, usually, beneficial. Gill could be argumentative, contradictory and sometimes misguided in what he wrote about letters and typography, though most of it needed saying at the time. What he did with his eyes and hands for the Roman letter is, however, unambiguous, appropriate, decent and never dull. His stature was great, though it has diminished since some of the battles he fought have been won and the issues he took up with the printers of his day are no longer the same, technically or aesthetically, as they then were.

Golden Cockerel Press Type