Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-processing applications have come with it as the default font. We tend, therefore, to regard it less as something created than as something for all intents and purposes eternal, but there was a time when publishers had to actively adopt it. The first American firm to start using Times New Roman was the Merrymount Press, which had already made a highly prestigious name for itself with publications like the elegant Book of Common Prayer financed by no less a captain of industry than J. Pierpont Morgan. But other printers knew Merrymount for a book that would have inspired in them an equally worshipful impulse. “Released in 1922 with a later revision in 1937,” Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use “became known as the standard work on the history of [printing and typography] and a basic book for all interested in the graphic arts. This two-volume work spans nearly 450 years and includes detailed analyses of the printers and type designers and their work.” So writes the designer Nicholas Rougeux, previously featured here on Open Culture for his digital editions of vintage books like Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants; British & Exotic Mineralogy; A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds; Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours; Euclid’s Elements, and Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s collections of rose and lily illustrations. His latest project to go live is a painstakingly assembled digital edition of Printing Types, which you can explore here. That book was also originally the work of one man, Merrymount Press founder Daniel Berkeley Updike. “During his tenure at Harvard University, he taught a course on Technique of Printing in the Graduate School of Business Administration for five years,” Rougeux w...
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