Printers' Maxims & Other Notes

Carl Shank • March 23, 2024

Printers Maxims & Other Notes

Printers and typesetters can gain much wisdom from older printers. The Printers’ Handbook of Trade Recipes, Hints & Suggestions Relating to Letterpress and Lithographic Printing, Bookbinding, Stationery, Engraving, Etc., compiled by Charles Thomas Jacobi, London, 1891, gives what is called “Maxims for Printers.” These maxims and many others have guided the printing trade for many years. They distill the wisdom of centuries of printing and typography. We would do well to heed such advice.


1.   It is better to remain idle than to work at a loss.

2.   Genius is as rare in printing as in any other art.

3.   Legitimate competition is a sign of life and health.

4.   Do your work carefully, striving for constant improvement.

5.   Follow copy, provided it is good, and never copy anything bad.

6.   You cannot be a successful printer if the imprint of care and study is not upon brain and hands.

7.   Preserve all specimens of good work that come into your possession, and spend your leisure time in their study.

8.   Unless an apprentice is possessed of an ambition and determination to excel, the chances are that he will always be but a poor workman.

9.   Skill in business, a well-earned reputation for uniformly superior work, a good financial credit, promptness, honorable and liberal dealing, correct and steady personal and business habits, are absolutely necessary concomitants of success.

10. No matter how good a printer you are, you will learn something every day; and in every job you do for a customer, study how you can improve it next time. Never let a poor or carelessly executed job go out of your office, no matter even if, by mistake in “estimating,” or for any other reason, you may lose money on this particular one.

11. Study the work of first-class printers. A skilled workman has expended time, thought, and labor in its production.

12. It is not the grace or beauty of a single line that produces the result sought. The specimen must be judged as a whole.

13. Never curve a line where it would look better straight.

14. Do not crowd a job to put in a flourish or ornament.

15. Elaborate borders can only be used effectively by first-class workmen.

16. A plain rule border, with a neat corner, is more effective than a display border on a small card.

17. Ornament has to be kept strictly within the stern chasteness of taste, and permits of no extravagance of detail.

18. Ornament should always be subservient to its proper use. Any superfluity or preponderance destroys the proper effect.

19. Better do a good, plain job in black ink and one style of type, than an outrageous combination of fantastic ornaments in the glowing hues of the rainbow.

20. The use of ornaments requires a cultivated taste. They were intended to “light up,” not smother; to give an “airy grace,” not detract; to do away with “monotony,” not make a dreary waste.


Color Blindness

The land, especially during the holiday season, is flooded with abominations of tint and taste, with miserable chromos and calendars that are a disgrace to the art. When will craftsmen learn to avoid the delusions and pitfalls of color, and assert the strict taste embodied in black and white? Zebra-striped and rainbow-illuminated monstrosities will ever be a plague to the inventor, and are worthy only of some demented members of the paste-brush brigade.


Hints on Composition

Understand your take fully before leaving the foreman or copy hook. Time spent in this way is profitably invested. At least read through the outlines of the job. If pamphlet or book-work, the reading of the first page or two will be sufficient. Determine upon display lines. Spelling, style of punctuation, capitalizing and paragraphs, should be according to usage of establishment. If possible, absorb the subject of your take; it will render work more engaging.


The Origin & Use of Italic

The form of Roman now known as Italic was originally called Aldine. The first volume printed in this character had the capitals with their stems upright like those of the current round hand. These first editions were the works of Virgil, printed by Aldus Pius Manutius, in 1512, and it is known that this celebrated printer made use of a manuscript text entirely copied by Francesco Petrarca. Thus, it is said, that Manutius desiring to pay public and reverent homage to the author of the Canzoni, appropriately wished a hanging character cut in imitation of his writing, entrusting the design and the cutting to a skilled artist, one Francesco de Bologna. But the fashion of these editions in cursive italic type lasted only a short time, having been imitated by foreign printers in a careless and illegible manner. The cursive character was at that time known both in Italy and outside of the country under the name of Aldine, but later the title of cursive was given to it from the writing of the Roman Chancellery, called cursiveti seu cancellarii; a title which in Italy has superseded every other.


Other information on Italics can be found in Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style — “Early italic fonts had only modest slope and were designed to be used with upright roman capitals. There are some beautiful fifteenth-century manuscript italics with no slope whatsoever, and some excellent typographic versions, old and new, that slope as little as 2°or 3°. Yet others slope as much as 20°. Italic and roman lived quite separate lives until the middle of the sixteenth century. Before that date, books were set in either roman or italic, but not in both. In the late Renaissance, typographers began to use the two for different features in the same book. Typically, roman was used for the main text and italic for the preface, headnotes,  sidenotes and for verse or block quotations. The custom of combining italic and roman in thesame line, using italic to emphasize individual words and mark classes of information, developed late in the sixteenth century and flowered in the seventeenth.” (Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Hartley & Marks, 1992 edition, 54)

 

Bringhurst goes on to comment on font use — "Don't use a font you don't need. The marriage of type and text requires courtesy to the in-laws, but it does not mean that all of them ought to move in, nor even that all must come to visit. Boldface roman type did not exist until the nineteenth century, and bold italic is even more recent.Generations of good typographers were quite content without such variations. Font manufacturers nevertheless now often sell these extra weights as part of a basic package, thereby encouraging typographers - beginners especially - to use bold roman and italic whether they need them or not." (Bringhurst, 52)

 

“Some of what a typographer must set, like some of what any musician must play, is simply passage work. Even an edition of Plato or Shakespeare will contain a certain amount of routine text: page numbers,scene numbers, textual notes, the copyright claim, the publisher's name and address, and the hyperbole onthe jacket, not to mention the passage work or background writing that is implicit in the text itself. Butjust as a good musician can make a heart-wrenching ballad from a few banal words and a trivial tune, so thetypographer can make poignant and lovely typography from bibliographical paraphernalia and textual chaff.The ability to do so rests on respect for the text as a whole, and on respect for the letters themselves. Perhaps the rule should read: Give full typographical attention especially to incidental details.” (Robert Bringhurst, 24)


Successful Layout & Design

Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase”

By Carl Shank • June 13, 2026
Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase” Carl Shank, CARE Typography Most everyone knows what “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters are. They refer, of course, to our “capital” letters and our “regular” small print. But not many know why or how they came to be known by such terminology. The answer is found in the history and development of typography and printing. “Case” here doesn’t refer to “circumstance” or “condition.” It refers to the wooden trays used to store metal letters, the top case for capital letters (“uppercase”) and the lower case for small letters. Each tray was divided into compartments to hold the type. The lower case also held the punctuation marks and other pieces of type, like “spacers.” The type case was a shallow wooden tray divided into compartments of various sizes. There were about thirty styles of type cases, and some of these were made in different sizes.[1] The most common, or standard, size was 32¼ by 16 inches, outside dimensions, and ⅛ inches deep, inside. One of three traditional plans or schemes for such type cases involved (1) all characters in one case; (2) capitals, small capitals and a few other characters in one case; or (3) the small letters, figures, points, spaces and quads in another case. The two latter cases formed a pair and would nearly always be used together.(See Images) Hand compositors (or “swifts”) would take individual letters, spaces and punctuation marks or other characters from the type case and place them in what was called a composing “stick” in such a manner that when the type characters are properly assembled, they form words, sentences and paragraphs. The work of the press room compositor was divided into two fundamental operations — the “setting” of type and the “unsetting” of type. The former was called composition and the latter, distribution. A visual example of such typesetting can be seen in some of the episodes of The Waltons, an American historical dramatelevision series about a family in rural western Virginia in the Appalachian/Blue Ridge mountains chain, during the economic hardships and mass unemployment of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the subsequent United State home front during World War II in the 1940s. The series aired from 1972 to 1981. John-Boy, a leading character of the series, opened a print shop in a shed by the family home with an old-fashioned mechanical printer that required setting cold metal type from a type case. His brother was the compositor while John-Boy ran the printing machine.

Vanity Type

By Carl Shank • June 6, 2026
Reading through an old volume of Frederick Nelson Phillips, Inc, Type Faces:With Which We 'Prove It With Proofs' in Typography for Advertisements (New York, 1924), I came across some type that falls outside of the standard typography models, called "vanity type." The term “vanity typography” is not a formal category in typographic history like Old Style, Transitional, Modern, or Sans Serif. Designers typically use the phrase informally to describe typography that draws attention primarily to itself rather than serving the text or reader. Vanity typography occurs when type is used as a display of the designer's skill, fashion, or personal taste rather than to improve communication. Readability is sometimes sacrificed for self-expression and artistic flair. Such type styles use excessive ornamentation, decorative letterforms, overuse of effects like shadows, outlines, gradients and distortions, unusual spacing, and generally typography used to impress rather than inform. Notice in the sample by Phillips, the different "A's," "F's,", "G's," "H's," "L's," "M's," "S's," T's" and "W's." This is not calligraphy lettering, but rather type that could have been used for verses or opening letters to paragraphs or stories.
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