I recently happened upon a video presentation by Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw concerning Anthony Froshaug’s Typographic Norms (hereafter TN) and their proposed response to it (Typographic Norms 2, TN2) that apparently has yet to appear. I found it so odd that TN should be found so provocative as to be called ‘disturbing’ and treated with such awe that I took the trouble to trace the articles quoted in the presentation, as well as my own notes from various sources, concerning the work. Had I missed something?

Roberts and Shaw were not the first to be provoked by TN. They quote (from a 2002 article by Caroline Archer in Baseline) a pressman (unnamed – because beneath the notice of the ‘professional’?) at the Kynoch Press, which published TN: ‘[Froshaug had] got this twisted thing on his mind about this 12pt unit... I couldn’t read it and I couldn’t explain it to anybody. I don’t know what it was about. It was typography gone wrong for me. None of the clients understood it...’ Alan Kitching, who was on hand to receive a copy of TN when it was newly printed, said in an interview for Eye (Winter 1994), ‘It completely threw me’; in his own remarks for TN2, he wrote, ‘I was blown away... I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. But eventually the penny dropped.’

Others met the work with equal awe: Robin Kinross, in one of his purpler passages (in his near-hagiographic tome on Froshaug), described TN as ‘beautiful constellations, mysterious reports on typography’. In the same article in Eye just quoted, the author, Julia Thrift, suggested that TN has ‘overtones of the cabalistic, mystical aura that surrounds the pre-digital craft of typography.’ Stuart Bailey, in his dissertation Work in progress, likened it to a calligram or a concrete poem.

What?

If anything, I would say, TN has the opposite of a ‘cabalistic, mystical aura’ (leaving aside the question of whether any such thing actually surrounds the pre-digital craft of typography). It is, rather, a clear example of the way in which Kinross (who also subscribed to this notion of either deliberate or pre-conscious secrecy in early printing), in a less expansive mood, defined ‘[modern] typography’ itself: ‘printing explaining its own secrets with its own means of multiplying texts and images’ (Unjustified Texts; Modern Typography). Froshaug simply shows the spaces and quadrats belonging to each available point size in the Anglo-American and Didot systems, in both numerical (in points) and graphical tables; material that can function as either a space or a quad, depending on its orientation, is shown in red. This is hardly the stuff of mystery, let alone mysticism.*

Nevertheless some questions do arise, among them

 ·  Why are only spaces shown in a document called Typographic Norms?
 ·  In what way do these systems of spaces constitute (a) set(s) of norms?
 ·  How does such a seemingly rational presentation square with Froshaug’s later confession of an ‘immense interest in emotional and structural meaning of text’ (from his autobiographical sketch in Art without boundaries, 1972), or his reference to the ‘most loved and fullest meaning’ of a text (‘Typography is a grid’, The Designer, January 1967)? In TN there is no text, and, one would think, no emotional meaning.

There is in fact a clear connection between TN and ‘Typography is a grid’: the cover of the journal issue in which the latter appeared shows part of the Anglo-American spaces page from TN, and the selfsame cover is reproduced and captioned in the article itself. We can use the article, then, along with commentary upon it, as keys to understand TN.

In ‘Typography is a grid’, Froshaug is concerned to disabuse people of the notion that typography is ‘the study of placing letters on a field:... a more precise form of lettering’. Rather, ‘the word typography means to write/print using standard elements’, and furthermore, ‘to use standard elements implies some modular relationship between such elements’. Peter Burnhill called typography the ‘modular co-ordination of language’ (‘Outside the whale’, Information Design Journal 8/3 [1996]), and in a letter to the editor of Visible Language – immediately after quoting ‘Typography is a grid’ – he wrote, ‘in typography, meaning is a condition of the position of an event in space’, and ‘To position implies the ability to position which, in typography, is a condition of the units of measurement built into the machines we use to assemble meaningless things meaningfully.’

So control of space enables typography to convey meaning: space both separates and connects; it organizes; it orders and groups; it makes text intelligible. I believe, in elevating (so to speak) printing spaces to this level of presentation, Froshaug means to show that space is the fundamental material of typography. If so, TN is indeed a clear example of Kinross’s ‘[modern] typography’, if not from the technical standpoint (see footnote), then from the conceptual one: printing showing its workings by its means, making the invisible and indivisible foundation (space) visible and discrete (spaces).

Indeed, as Burnhill and Froshaug note and TN shows, space must be discretely incremented – standardized – in order for it to be controlled. It appears to be a blank canvas but, in metal type at least, is in fact a solid, not a void, that must be measured, weighed, handled, at least as carefully as the letterforms, and in certain kinds of work may literally outweigh the letters. 

There are other standards – norms – held up in TN as well: ‘black & white are the typographic colours, the flag-standard... Pica... is a standard measure’. And Kinross notes elsewhere that Froshaug’s ‘search for standards was... a search for essential elements’ – not just arbitrary rules – with not only a technical but also an ethical dimension (octavo 86.1).

How might space best be divided and measured? Knowing anecdotally (from Ian McLaren, a student of Froshaug’s at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, quoted in the TN2 presentation) that Froshaug argued for the superiority of the Anglo-American point system and was developing TN during his time teaching at Ulm, we can see TN as a visual embodiment of that argument. TN shows a more fully proportional, analog, craft-oriented, and extensive Anglo-American system over against the more rigid, mathematically oriented, Didot system of spaces (akin, though not identical, to the difference between imperial and metric systems); the starkly different amounts of red in the two sets of visual tables illustrate at a glance one way of measuring (arguing) the flexibility in the two systems. 

This argument extends beyond the units of measurement. Seen through the lens of ‘Typography is a grid’, TN can be seen as an argument, even a reaction – set in the quintessentially English Gill Sans – against the Germanic grid-and-Grotesk with which he worked at Ulm. There is here, after all, what Kinross calls ‘a pleasure’ (and which I might call an urge or even necessity) ‘evident in letting the information reach to find its own dimensions’ as the unfolding leaves spill out well beyond the nominal format of the booklet. Building up a typographical work with physical spaces is less abstract, both in material and syntactic terms, than imposing a grid from the outside, which indeed could be seen as ‘placing letters [or images] on a field’ in a way potentially divorced from meaning. There is more than a little parallel to (Western common-practice) music here: modular scales; small structures based on simple divisions of a basic unit; larger ones built up from multiples thereof; space (silence) as the equal or greater partner that shapes the text. The musical work shown in the TN2 presentation suggests that at least one other person has understood TN in this way.

Finally, although letterpress was still alive in the early days of ‘the Swiss school’ and the familiar grid systems likely evolved in part at least through the Swiss need to print texts in multiple languages, as well as in conjunction with the developing ‘integrated book’, TN also proposes to us the question whether the grid as we know it came to seem more necessary or useful – or seems so today – because physical spacing material and its units have fallen out of use. Perhaps Froshaug already foresaw this change in the conceptual framework of typography with the advent of photosetting precisely in the period in which he produced TN and ‘Typography is a grid’. TN thus also challenges us to find ways to deal with on-screen text, where space is fluid and relationships are difficult to control. Is typography, in Froshaug’s terms, even possible online? Is meaning? Or does the Internet, in this very specific way, embody the ‘post-truth’ society, a world in which meaning seems impossible? Perhaps there is something, after all, to Kinross’s ‘aesthetics of resistance’ (the phrase he used to describe the work of Werkman, Sandberg, and the Dutch wartime underground press generally) rooted in materiality, urgency, and real content. If so, its time has surely come again.

TN, though on the surface not a text at all, might well be the closest map of its designer’s  quest to give meaning visual form. Froshaug’s writings remind us of the importance of this work; TN suggests the means and material by which it might be pursued.

*  There is nevertheless significant irony here: the rectangles shown are not, according to Kinross, printed from actual spacing material, but rather from line blocks made from drawings; furthermore, the systems of spaces shown have, by my understanding, to do only with hand-set type and not the Monotype machine used to set the document. Is this a post-‘modern typography’, printing explaining its former workings by its present means?