The abnormality of our time, that which makes it contrary to nature, is its deliberate and stated determination to make the working life of men & the product of their working hours mechanically perfect, and to relegate all the humanities, all that is of its nature humane, to their spare time, to the time when they are not at work.
There is some irony to be found in the fact that it took the dematerialization of type, from metal to digital, to make it so widely present in so many minds. No longer innocents, we are now all asked to select fonts (that are fundamentally the same as those used by professionals) for our personal communications, however trivial.
The world is not yet clothed in garments which befit it; in architecture, furniture, clothes, we are still using and wearing things which have no real relation to the spirit which moves our life. We are wearing and using them simply because we are accustomed to them. The intellectual excitement which moves individual designers does not affect the mass of people. The majority still think Gothic architecture to be appropriate to churches, though Gothic architecture is simply a method of building appropriate to stone and is not really more Christian than Hindu. We still wear collars and ties, whether we be kings, clerks or furnace men, though there is no necessity for a collar or a tie in any of these trades. All this is merely intellectual sloth; nobody can be bothered to live according to reason, there is even a strong national feeling of distaste for any attempt to do so.
If you are going to employ men to build a wall, and if those men are to be treated simply as tools, it is imbecility to make such a design for your wall as depends upon your having masons who are artists. The 19th century architects’ practice of design ornamental walls and drawing out full size on paper every detail of ornament is not at least seen to be ridiculous even by architects.
And this is not because we hate ornament & the ornamental, but because we can no longer procure such things; we have not got a system of manufacture which naturally produces them, and, most important of all, if we insist on the ornamental we are not making the best of our system of manufacture, we are not getting the things which that system makes best.
But while it is clear that the determining principle of an industrial world (what the theologians call its soul) is such as we have described — the perfection of mechanical manufacture, the obliteration of all intellectual responsibility in the workman, the relegation of all humane interests to nonworking hours & the consequent effort to reduce working hours to a minimum — it is equally clear that the outward appearance of our world shows at present very little of the principle which inspires it.
A world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardized and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing but indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room — a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.
Moreover, to sit on excellent steel furniture in an equally excellent operating-theatre house and do “fret” work or modeling in clay or “water color painting” with mass-produced water colors will give much amusement to many. Then will be seen the truth of the saying that: Industrialism has released the artist from the necessity of making anything useful.
Letters are signs for sounds. Letters are not pictures or representations. Picture writing and hieroglyphics are not letters from our point of view. Letters are not pictures or representations. They are more or less abstract forms.
Lettering is for us the Roman alphabet and the Roman alphabet is lettering. Whatever the Greeks or the Germans or the Russians or the Czecho-Slovaks or other people may do, the English language is done in Roman letters, an these letters may be said to have reached a permanent type about the 1st century AD.