Hell’s Angel

Janice Kirkpatrick on how our words are ruled by the Roman Empire.

On the Monday October 3rd 1932 The Times newspaper dramatically transformed it’s character to counter the effect of radio as the new mass medium and retain its monopoly on news. Overnight the paper changed from Germanic dark pages and a Gothic heavy-metal masthead, to emerge blinking at the light white pages and spaces of the modern era. The Establishment had altered its accent.

Not everyone was happy with the new-look newspaper. Rumours tell of ructions in the Boardroom and in “Letters to the Editor” readers expressed their sorrow at the disappearance of their dear old friend, the gothic headline that was almost a part of the British constitution.

But the born-again broadsheet was a resounding success. It was endorsed by Sir William Lister, His Majesty’s oculist, who pronounced it easy on the eye. Voysey, the English architect and contemporary of Mackintosh, congratulated the paper on being so new and vibrant while Humphrey Milford, publisher of the Oxford University Press declared that he had never been able to comfortably read the old newspaper in the car, even while wearing his spectacles. But he could now easily read the re-designed paper without his spectacles as he drove to work, and what’s more, he blamed Morrison for this new state of affairs.

While Milford’s driving skills may have been somewhat quaint, the Morison in question was not: He was, and is, the most important British typographical expert of the twentieth century. Stanley Morison was typographical adviser to The Times from 1929, he was also an employee of Monotype Corporation who produced the typesetting technology that dominated the printing industries for most of the last century. He was a radical Englishman, a conscientious objector and one-time Marxist who believed that a more modern newspaper would attract a new, more democratic reader.

Morison created a typeface especially for the re-designed Times. It was an amalgamation of new ideas packaged within the familiar, incorruptible shape of classical stone-carved letters. His invention was lighter on the page and therefore easier on the eye than the chunky black letters it replaced. Simultaneously he increased the “word yield”; the number of letters that could be set on a page that was a vital factor in a business where words meant money. But the crucial factor in the outrageous success of his typeface was his ability to give it the voice of authority: That of Classical Rome whose integrated system of democracy, law, philosophy, architecture and the alphabet conquered the ancient world and continued to direct and shape British society.

Times New Roman, the face Morison created, was the most readable typeface of its day and remains the most widely used in the English-speaking world. It’s often bundled, in one version or another, with almost every personal computer on the market.

This package of old-style information presented in a new technological format created an outwardly anachronistic but stunningly effective double-act. It allowed ambitious corporations to assume the familiar and trustworthy shape of Roman letters in this, the most recent round in a six-thousand year long conspiracy to dominate the world, with words.

From writing’s humble origins in Mesopotamia to the vast empires of Monotype, Microsoft and Murdoch, powerful people have conspired to control our words and our world. Throughout history we learned that the ability to read and write gave the author “authority” over others who could not: The writer was right. The Word was a gift of god and The Law. If words were printed in black (ink) on white (paper) we assumed that they were the truth. Words even transcended death, becoming magical and conferring immortality on the author who could influence new generations from beyond the grave. Letters were the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, intractable and eternal. Throughout history we used their power to cast spells, preach gospels, make laws, create and crack codes to win wars, we’ve founded type-foundries and the constitutions of companies and countries, and now technology has moved the plot into a new electronic dimension.

Since the invention of the typewriter, illiteracy has risen in direct proportion to the development of new writing technologies. As access to information increases the value of handwriting decreases and a growing technological underclass becomes disenfranchised. In business, handwriting is considered amateur, unprofessional and untrustworthy while we’re urged to value word-processed virtual reality over the real thing. In our rush to embrace a technological future we imprudently choose electronic information over hard-copy, even if it can be invisibly altered by the very corporations who guarantee its incorruptibility: Software is discredited unlike the simplicity of hardcopy or manuscripts. We even seem to trust the incontinent empires of Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and the US Government, or maybe we simply have no choice in a corporate world without borders.

With thanks to Stanley Morison our most popular typeface honours the honest stone-carved letters and monolithic culture of Classicism. But some things have changed, because in the twenty minutes or so it took a Roman stonemason to carve a single letter, tens of thousands of copies of a national newspaper now roll off a printing press and countless millions log-on to The Internet and World Wide Web.

The Romans may not have conquered the world the first time round but with the help of the communications supercompanies who control our words and the technologies and distribution to reach a wider audience, their classicist values—call it the Times New Roman Empire—could still triumph.