Mesopotamian cylinder seals

“Mesopotamian cylinder seals provided a forgery-proof method for sealing documents and proving their authenticity. In use for over three thousand years, these small cylinders had images and writing etched into their surfaces. When they were rolled across a damp clay tablet, a raised impression of the depressed design, which became a “trademark” for the owner, was formed. . . . Many such stones had a hollow perforation running through them so that they could be worn on a string around the neck or wrist. . . .
The widely traveled Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Babylonians each wore a cylinder seal on a cord around their wrists like a bracelet. Prized as ornaments, status symbols, and unique personal signatures, cylinder seals were even used to mark a damp clay seal on the house door when the occupants were away. . . .”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

a divine scribe

“Cuneiform was a difficult writing system to master, even after the Assyrians simplified it to only 560 signs. . . .
The general public held those who could write in awe, and it was believed that death occured when a divine scribe etched one’s name in a mythical Book of Fate.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

The highest development of cuneiform

“Around 2800 B.C. scribes turned the pictographs on their sides and began to write in horizontal rows, from left to right and top to bottom. . . . About three hundred years later, writing speed was increased by replacing the sharp-pointed stylus with a triangular-tipped one. This stylus was pushed into the clay instead of being dragged through it. . . . This innovation radically altered the nature of the writing; pictographs evolved into an abstract sign writing called cuneiform (from the Latin for “wedge-shaped”). . . .
As early scribes developed their written language to function in the same way as their speech, the need to represent spoken sounds not easily depicted arose. Adverbs, prepositions, and personal names often could not be adapted to pictographic representation. Picture symbols began to represent the sounds of the objects depicted instead of the objects themselves. Cuneiform became rebus writing, which is pictures and/or pictographs representing words and syllables with the same or similar sound as the object depicted. Pictures were used as phonograms, or graphic symbols for sounds. The highest development of cuneiform was its use of abstract signs to represent syllables, which are sounds made by combining more elementary sounds.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

early pictographs

“The early pictographs evolved in two ways: first, they were the beginning of pictorial art—the objects and events of the world were recorded with increasing fidelity and exactitude as the centuries passed; second, they formed the basis for writing. The images, where the original pictorial form was retained or not, ultimately became symbols for spoken-language sounds.
The Paleolithic artist developed a tendency toward simplification and stylization. Figures became increasingly abbreviated and were expressed with a minimum number of lines. By the late Paleolithic period, some petroglyphs and pictographs had been reduced to the point of almost resembling letters. . . .
The leap from village culture to high civilization occured after the Sumerian people arrived in Mesopotamia near the end of the fourth millennium B.C. . . .
One theory holds that the origin of visible language evolved from the need to identify the contents of sacks and pottery containers used to store food. Small clay tags were made that identified the contents with a pictograph and the amount through an elementary decimal numbering system, based on the ten human fingers.
The earliest written records are tablets from the city of Uruk. They apparently list commodities by pictographic drawings of objects accompanied by numerals and personal names inscribed in orderly columns. An abudance of clay in Sumer made it the logical material for record keeping, and a reed stylus sharpened to a point was used to draw the fine, curved lines of the early pictographs.”

—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.

two great type designers

“In the eighteenth century two great type designers drew English printing, at least temporarily, out of the depths of dullness and ugliness into which it had fallen.
The first of these was the Englishman, William Caslon, whose business was casting, or “founding,” type. Like Nicolas Jenson, Caslon had the skilled eye and hand of an engraver. . . . About 1724 he designed a type that came to be known as “Caslon Old Face,” based largely on the fine letter forms of Jenson but a little less black and heavy, showing the free work of a fine artist. . . .
The other style of roman type designed in the eighteenth century, which had an even greater influence than the “old-style” of Cason for a while, was what came to be known in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as modern. Its most successful designer, perhaps, was Giambattista Bodoni, an Italian printer working at Parma. Bodoni’s modern letters have no gradual shading of thick lines or curves into thin as have the oldstyle; the thicks are very thick and black and the thins are almost hairlines. The serifs, instead of rounding gradually into the stem, are squared off at the ends of the main strokes. Bodoni’s letters make an elegant, sparkling page but not so readable as one of Caslon’s.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

printing in Venice

“Nicholas Jenson . . . former master of the mint at Tours . . . had been sent to Mainz in 1458 by the French king to learn Gutenberg’s secret, [and] returned to France in 1461. Finding that the son of Charles VII, who had succeeded to the French throne, was not not interested in the new art, he emigrated to Italy where he met with more enthusiasm.
Some time before 1470 he started printing in Venice. He so perfected the roman small letters that his type forms became models not only for printers in his own day but for all since who have cared for the beautiful letter forms.
Jenson’s type was beautiful, and the letters fitted harmoniously together on the page because he did not try to imitate handwriting, as did so many of the early printers and type-cuttters, but accepted honestly the medium in which he worked. He took as inspiration a fine manuscript hand, but only as inspiration, and then worked as an independent craftsman in metal. He did not try to follow the pen slavishly.
This French maker of coins and types brought much glory to Venice. . . . Another Venetian who followed him and used his fonts of type, however, won even greater fame both as printer and type designer. Aldus Manutius was his name.
Aldus . . . put more care into the designing and setting and arranging of his type and the actual printing than had most of his predecessors. He produced some of the finest books of all times. Others had printed large books; he made small and cheap ones, well printed and easy to read. A special type that he designed for these little books, based on a slanted “familiar,” or local, handwriting was the first italic type.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

a true ‘small-letter’ alphabet

“In 781 Charlemagne invited to his court a famous English scholar from York named Alcuin. . . . In 796 Alcuin, encouraged by Charlemagne, started a school at the Abbey of Saint Martin’s at Tours. . .
First of all, Charlemagne gave Alcuin the job of managing the revision and rewriting of all Church literature. . . .
Alcuin set our first to teach his scribes to write as fine and readable a hand as possible. Fortunately he had leared to write the northern type of Angle-Saxon script, which ws the most beautiful then being written in England. It was a modification and further development of the semi-uncials of the Irish monks. Based on this form, a new style of writing which Alcuin developed at Tours was spread throughout Europe. . . .
The ‘Caroline’ alphabet (named for Charlemagne) which Alcuin designed, was a true ‘small-letter’ alphabet. . . . [T]he Caroline letters arrived at forms so closely akin to the letters we use every day . . . that the resemblance is immediately apparent. . . .
The sentence now started with a capital and continued with a true miniscule, not just a small capital.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

writing as compared to drawing

“[I]n Roman letters . . . all the strokes are not of the same weight; some are thick, some are thin, and the curves show a gradual change from thick to thin. This characteristic was not necessarily designed; it, like the more flowing shape of the letters, came about because the tools which were used in developing the letters gave them that character naturally. The Roman alphabet was developed through writing as compared to drawing.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

The missing letters

“The standard Greek alphabet had twenty-four letters; the standard late Roman alphabet had twenty-three; ours has twenty-six.
From the standard Greek alphabet the Romans took A, B, E, Z, H, I, K, M, N, O, T, X and Y with hardly any change at all. . . . Remodeling and finishing other Greek letters, the Romans produced C (and G), L, S, P, R, D and V. F and Q were taken from two old characters abandoned by the Greeks themselves. And that makes twenty-three. . . .
The missing letters, J, U and W, were not used by the Romans at all. U and W developed from V about a thousand years ago, and J developed from the letter I about five hundred years ago.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

all consonants, no vowels

“The Phoenicians, we believe, supplied the Greeks with nineteen characters—all consonants, no vowels. They wrote entirely with consonants. . . . It was a sort of ‘abbreviation’ writing. We sometimes do almost the same thing as, for instance, yr for ‘your’ and bldg for ‘building.’”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.