A Legacy of Letters

During the typographically heroic years between World Wars I and II, Stanley Morison was advisor to the Monotype Corporation. In its discrimination and judgement, Morison’s program for the cutting of book typefaces at Monotype set the stage for all subsequent work, and in one way or another must be reckoned with in any future development. The value of his work has not diminished with the passing of time or even with the commercial displacement of relief printing, the technology productive of four centuries of typographical letterforms. When aged sixty-four, Morison took a look back at his work in the pages of A Tally of Types. Since the Tally was published, the revival of historic typefaces has been degraded and parially lost by the change from relief to photo-offset printing. But even before that came to pass, the revival of old typefaces was philosophically challenged by some of Morison’s contemporaries and even, to some degree, devalued by Morison himself. The positive value of his work then, its timelessness and vitality, needs to be re-estbalished today. Mark Argetsinger’s A Legacy of Letters—through a deep reading of the writings of Morison and his contemporaries—explores the question of type design and its relationship to the technologies of type production.