he name of Eric Gill is probably most widely known today as a type designer. As an artist, he was much more than that, a letter cutter in stone, a sculptor and a wood engraver. As a man, he was a polemicist on religious and social issues, with a startlingly patriarchal attitude to women, whilst appearing as a conspicuous public figure distinctively clad in a semi-monastic costume. He was, for all that, the most innovative and prolific of all English type designers, producing more than a dozen original typefaces in the course of his active and crowded life. This seems a paradoxical achievement, as he had deliberately turned his back on the industrial world, living in a succession of isolated communities where conditions were not so much simple as primitive. With one exception, the trials for Perpetua, all of Gill’s typefaces were achieved by complex and highly refined engineering techniques developed for twentieth-century type making.
Gill made a decisive gesture against technology early in his career, when in his twenties, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism and newly married, he deliberately abandoned one sure skill which guaranteed him a regular income. He had developed a strong but delicate style of draughtsmanship with pen and brush, which enabled him to provide publishers with hand-drawn lettering, which lifted the most commonplace book or journal out of the ordinary. His work in 1906 for a series of pocket classics for the German fine-printer Count Harry Kessler at the Insel Verlag, Leipzig demonstrated his remarkable aptitude for drawing letters. During the same period Gill designed a distinctive corporate identity for the dominant British bookstore chain, W. H. Smith & Sons (whose managing director, C. H. St. John Hornby was a private-press printer), which survived for some seventy years as the company’s identity.
The process which Gill found both technically repugnant and morally repulsive, in terms of the reproduction of his penmanship, was the photographic scaling of his artwork ‚ which he remarked upon as ‘beastly in itself’ ‚ using stinking chemicals and producing a ‘scratchy’ result. Another reason, perhaps, for his rejection of the photographic process was that it allowed for a dishonest faking, where errors and second thoughts could be disguised and the reduction in scale misleadingly suggested the artist was endowed with a miraculously minute precision in drawing detail. In contrast, Gill turned to engraving in wood, ‘for the sake of the lettering’ vigorously if crudely at first, and then with growing mastery of the material and a visible enjoyment of the means of transferring lines created at the original scale directly to paper, without the trickery of mechanical invention.
How could an artist with these principles have entered the industrial world of twentieth-century type-making? Gill’s early sketches for type related projects seem not to have been realized, until his reassociation with the decisive figure of Stanley Morison, also a Catholic convert. They had known one another while both doing work for the Catholic publishing house of Burns and Oates, and by the mid 1920s, Morison had become an influential figure with the British Monotype Corporation, promoting his own ideas for classical types that he considered they should make, such as Garamond, Baskerville, Bembo and Fournier, based on historical models. This led to Morison’s uneasy relationship with Frank Hinman Pierpont, the Works Manager at the British firm. A Connecticut engineer, trained at Pratt & Whitney, Pierpont’s formidable standards of perfection, both for men and machines, were carried out by his hand-selected team of engineers, recruited while working in Berlin. The previous success of Monotype’s Imprint and Plantin developed by Pierpont, considered amongst the most intelligent historical adaptations ever made, had already proven his ability. However, the management handled this potentially explosive situation well, and gained with Morison a master salesman, who in 1924, when announcing the company’s programme of historic types, hinted that ‘at least one original design’ would be included in the plan. He may already have had Gill in mind, and he could be very persuasive.
In November 1925, when living in the remotest and most primitive of his retreats, the Black Mountains of South Wales, Gill noted in his diary that he was ‘drawing alphabets for Stanley Morison.’ These would have been the drawings for Perpetua, based upon his own highly individual stone cut letters. The drawings were sent to Charles Malin, the French hand punch cutter, which must have eased Gill’s conscience by having his drawings interpreted directly into steel by a master craftsman, rather than a soulless machine. This enabled Morison to present the half completed design to Monotype, but frustratingly, it would not be in a marketable state until 1932, due to the powerful opposition of Pierpont within the company. Morison was also eventually forced to abandon his plan for an original ‘romanized’ italic that hardly sloped, as an accompaniment to Perpetua Roman.
However, in 1927 Morison obtained more drawings from Gill, this time for a sans serif. This type, released in 1928 by Monotype, became known as Gill Sans, a type given his name as the previously designed roman type by Gill was not then ready for release to the printing trade.
The sans serif was a style with which Gill had some practice, being involved and assisting Edward Johnston with the development of the celebrated ‘Underground’ lettering for the London Underground Railway some 10 years earlier, when both designers and their families were members of the little craft community at Ditchling in southern England. More recently, in 1926, Gill had sketched a design for the publisher and bookseller Douglas Cleverdon, which Morison had sight of, and with a perfect sense of timing, he persuaded Monotype to develop and release Gill Sans to combat the families of Erbar, Futura and Kabel which were being launched in Germany during the latter 1920s. To the enhancement of Morison’s standing within the company, Gill Sans was a commercial success, which was reinforced by the wide range of weights and widths added over the next decade.
Pierpont, one of the great names of twentieth century type makers, like his contemporary type directors Morris Fuller Benton of ATF and Chauncey Hawley Griffith at Megenthaler Linotype, had the ability to extract sound, working typefaces from the sketches of hopeful artists, which required sensitivity as well as technical competence. But he overreached himself with an internal memorandum delivering his judgement on Gill Sans: ‘I see nothing in this design to recommend it and much that is objectionable’, but the management were undeterred. It is difficult not to feel sympathy with Pierpont and his team, having no option but to make a typeface from Gill’s drawings. These displayed Gill’s characteristic combination of grace in handling line, but an ignorance of the basic principles of the optical correction required to give type ‚ or indeed any lettering ‚ good alignment. Gill freely admitted, with these drawings, that he was not ‘type designing’, that he did not know enough about ‘typographical exigencies’ as he described them.
Whatever qualms Gill may have had beforehand, he found no difficulty working with Monotype and his visits to the factory created respect on both sides. For all his attachment to monastic simplicity, there was a fascination with machinery lurking within, since as a boy he had sketched with loving care steam locomotives, taking pains to get the lettering right. Years later, Gill Sans was adopted as a corporate identity by the London and North Eastern Railway and he drew the sign for the Flying Scotsman, the famous locomotive, and also gave an account of his ride in the driver’s cab ‚ as passionate and enthusiastic as anything he had written. The caster unit of the Monotype machine aroused similar feelings in its operators despite its environmentally less than friendly fumes and noise, but beautifully designed and superbly constructed. Ironically, the introduction of the Monotype ‘Super Caster’ under Pierpont’s direction ensured the success of the Gill type family, making available sizes up to 72 point, with printers more able to maintain an in-plant typefoundry.
During the protracted gestation of Perpetua, Gill wrote to Morison expressing a slight embarrassment. For a few years Gill had been making wood engravings for a fellow engraver, Robert Gibbings, who owned the Golden Cockerel Press, named for Le Coq d’or of Diaghilev’s exotic Russian Ballet. Gibbings had acquired the press in 1924 from its founder, Harold Midgely Taylor, and in the following year Gill made a series of wood engraved illustrations to accompany Sonnets and Verses by Enid Clay, Gill’s sister. Following on, Gill produced engravings for the Golden Cockerel Press with The Song of Songs in 1925, The Passion of The Lord Jesus Christ in 1926 and Troilus and Criseyde in 1927. The press, like Virginia Woolf’s and other British presses, used founts of Caslon Old Face, which, with Gill’s illustrations in combination, created criticism of the wood engravings for being ‘too black to go with type’, and Gibbings’ engravings were similarly rich in colour. They decided that the Golden Cockerel Press should have its own type, robust enough in its design to match their images, for an ambitious collaboration for a new production of The Four Gospels.
The source of Gill’s embarrassment, explained to Morison in 1928, was his attachment to the Golden Cockerel Press by an agreement which appeared to prevent him from designing new types for Monotype. Gill’s relations with Gibbings were then very close, but not a permanent obstacle to further work for Monotype, although Gill felt some awkwardness in embarking on a career as a type designer more or less independently of Morison. ‘I am coming round by degrees to consider myself capable of designing a fount of type’ and during the summer of 1929 he began to do so, and here he met a practical problem, which he solved with characteristic ingenuity. ‘Am at a loss how to proceed. I have made drawings to a large scale, but how am I to tell what they’ll look like small?’, he wrote to Morison, adding: ‘I have made a drawing of Lord’s Prayer actual size of 18 point (body). But neither my hand nor my eye is capable of working so small. Still the general effect is what I want ‚ colour, character, etc.’. By getting his small sketch photographically enlarged, working over the detail, having it reduced again, he began to work towards the effect he wanted. This was now an acceptance of the help available through photographic processes, which he had rejected earlier in his career. He expressed his overall conception for the Golden Cockerel type to Morison as: ‘a heavy closely-massed type suitable for use with modern wood engravings. Therefore I plump for an almost even line letter & short ascenders & descenders’.
The Golden Cockerel type, made for them by the Letterfoundry of H. W. Caslon & Co. Ltd. between October and December 1929, enabled Gibbings and Gill to work on the most ambitious project of the press and one of the most outstanding books of this century, an edition of The Four Gospels in a small folio format with rich historicated initials designed and largely engraved by Gill. The type had been created for an 18 point body and it was decided to have additional capitals at a larger size, using the same patterns, cast as a titling fount on a 24 point body. The results were displeasing, and the novice type-makers learned a lesson, as Gibbings later wrote: ‘one of the greatest changes you can make to a design is to alter the scale’. Gill worked over the drawings, making a new design for the 24 point capitals, and again for a 36 point size: ‘reducing the weight of the horizontals in proportion to that of the verticals, and so retrieved the lost elegance of the design’.
The design was conceived as 18 point and 14 point sizes both cast from the same patterns, without an italic. But, during the development of the Golden Cockerel roman types, a lower case italic fount was designed and produced that bears a relationship to the italic of Perpetua, originally with its own title of Felicity. The Golden Cockerel italic varied in one important design characteristic from the final version of Perpetua italic; instead of the flat-footed ‘sloped roman’ design, the serifs for Golden Cockerel italic lift obliquely giving a lightness and mobility to the design. Gill had not made capitals or numerals for the italic, preferring the fashion of the first italic types combining the ‘sloped miniscules’ with roman capitals. The lower case Golden Cockerel italic, combined with roman capitals was not used in The Four Gospels, but awaited the publication of The Hundredth Story of A. E. Coppard in 1931 for its first showing from the Golden Cockerel Press.
The Golden Cockerel type was the first that Gill made as a ‘type designer’ which provided the confidence for three further collaborations with the Caslon Letterfoundry. During 1930 he was also preparing drawings for the beautiful Joanna type, which was specifically made for Hague and Gill, his own printing office operated with Rene Hague, the husband of his daughter, Joan or Joanna. This exercise demonstrated how quickly he had learned to make images for translation into metal by a typefounder. In his own defiant words, Joanna was designed to be: ‘On the right lines for machine production’ and remains, oddly, the most exquisitely delicate of his type designs.
A proportion of the credit for the success of the Golden Cockerel type and Joanna, along with the Aries design of 1932 and Bunyan, produced in 1934, must go to the skill and expertise of the Caslon type drawing office. However, it must be noted that unlike the Monotype machinery system or more recent technologies, Caslon had no indications for ‘side bearings’ to determine character spacing and the degree of kerning. These, in the time-honoured fashion of traditional typefounding, were left to the expert justifier of matrices at the Foundry. Sadly, although the Foundry attempted to modernise their operation earlier this century to combat the challenge of the new composing machines, the effort failed in 1936, and the company ceased to trade after being established for over 200 years.
Robert Gibbings, proprietor of the Golden Cockerel Press, was as untidy and large in scale as Gill was slight, fastidious and neat. The period of the making of their type was one of rewarding creativity for both men, and with its stout serifs and generous proportions, the Golden Cockerel type is an appropriate memorial to their partnership.
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ITC Golden Cockerel™ Roman
ITC Golden Cockerel™ Italic
ITC Golden Cockerel™ Titling
ITC Golden Cockerel™ Initials and Ornaments