"It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and when, as it so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionistic antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.... Typography, I repeat, is a servant--the servant of thought and language to which it gives visible existence. When there are new ways of thinking and a new language, it will be time enough for a new typography."
The modern designer disagrees. He believes books can be freshened, made more appealing to eye and hand, and more inviting to read, just as product-packaging has benefited by the imaginative conceptions of skilled industrial designers. He concedes that books remain unsurpassed as a medium for transmitting thought to the reader's mind--and admits they do it best with a minimum of visual distraction. But, he asks, "is it not reasonable to remain open-minded and appraise the modern artist for what he may contribute?
"Books, to be sure, are much more than packages to be styled for shelf attention and sparkle. Yet it seems reasonable to believe they also may benefit by traveling the road of visual appeal and design attractiveness, and that they may be assisted in typographic handling to convey the author's words with a minimum of reading effort."
It isn't difficult to dismiss the modern approach and call it uninformed nonsense, but that doesn't lift the curtain and illumine the problem--or settle the continuing debate.
I recall discussing modern typography some years ago with the late D. B. Updike, in his library at the Merrymount Press in Boston. A catalog from the Museum of Modern Art was at hand, designed by Herbert Bayer of Bauhaus fame.
It looked strange in its all-lower-case typography, and seemed to slow reading because of that strangeness. To many it was the newest of the new ... perhaps it would institute a trend? Mr. Updike smiled, reached to a shelf for a book. It was printed more than a hundred years earlier in Paris and set throughout in lower-case. "So far as this had any influence, then or later," he remarked, "the experiment of _Typographie Economique_ is as dead as Queen Anne."
All of which points up Bertrand Russell's remarks, "On Being Modern Minded," in his recent _Unpopular Essays_[1]: "The desire to be contemporary is new only in degree," he declares, "it has existed to some extent in all previous periods that believed themselves to be progressive.