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With the exception of a brief but torid affair with Ariel, I have been faithful to the Times New Roman font my entire adult life. I used it to write my college research papers, my PhD thesis, and all my books to date. At first, I did so from Force of Habit. But with time, I came to appreciate that the lineage of my default font could be traced via the Italian Renaissance and medieval monasteries back to ancient Rome. The Latin alphabet, the modern world's dominant writing system, evolved from the alphabet brought by Greek colonists to southern Italy and adapted by the Atruscans. When the Romans began using it in the 7th century BC, it had only 21 letters.
Y and Z were added later to express the sounds of Greek words. The scholarly emperor Claudius contributed three more letters, a replacement of Y, an equivalent of U and a counterpart of the Greek letter SI that disappeared after his reign. Our U and W are medieval. J was distinguished from I in the early modern period. At first, the letters of the Latin alphabet closely resembled their Greek models. They became more distinctive over the course of the Republican era, evolving by the reign of Augustus into the majestic square capitals that still grace so many Roman monuments. The letters of late antique inscriptions tended to be taller, narrower, and less regular.
The angular letter forms of inscriptions were imitated on paper in the script known as rustic capitals. Since they were written rather than carved, rustic capitals were more fluid with curves and seraps absent on stone. Though impressive on the page, they were time-conuming to produce and so tended to be used only for luxury texts. Less formal documents were written in flowing cursive. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the production of secular manuscripts virtually ceased. Religious texts, however, continued to be copied, most often in a new rounded script called Unchul. Versions of Unchel were used widely for nearly half a millennium. The script persisted longest in Ireland, where Gaelic was written in a typeset
version until the mid 20th century. Elsewhere, Unchel was displaced by Carolian minuscule. Minuscule letters, simplified and compressed versions of capitals had been around for centuries. But the minuscule that evolved from unchel in the late 8th century was clearer, more elegant, and ultimately more popular than any of its predecessors. It came to be closely associated with the brief but brilliant Renaissance centered on the court of Charlemagne during which secular texts were copied again in large numbers for the first time since the fall of Rome. This was the era and the script that saved classical Latin literature from oblivion. From the 12th century onward, however, Carolynian minuscule began to be replaced by the compressed and
angular script known as Gothic or black letter. Though now associated with Germany, where the Gothic fractur was common until the Second World War, it was used throughout Europe. During the late Middle Ages, thanks to the rise of the universities and a growing literate class, more books were being produced than at any time since the fall of Rome. Gothic was adapted to different genres, a cramped variant for scholastic treatises, a large and rounded form for ecclesiastical books, and the intricate bastard for vernacular texts. We'll discuss how all of these were affected by the printing press after a brief word about this video's sponsor. Before the invention of printing, copying texts was difficult
and timeconuming. That's why something like 99% of all classical literature has vanished. But if our own civilization disappeared, who would know how to build a printing press? Well, you could if you had a copy of the book. The book is a sprawling survey of all the machines, gadgets, tips, and techniques that would be needed to rebuild a civilization with detailed descriptions and handdrawn illustrations covering everything from beekeeping to bicycles to, you guessed it, the printing press. So, if you're interested in history and human innovation, follow the link in the description and use the code Tollen Stone to save on your purchase of the book. Returning to our topic, the invention of printing changed
the appearance of books surprisingly little. The first printed books, in fact, were designed to resemble contemporary manuscripts. The font of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible, for example, imitated a local Gothic script. Religious texts were typically printed in types set versions of the familiar scholastic black letter. Printed editions of the classics, however, used the script that was destined to replace all the others. It was known as Litera Antiqua, the ancient or Roman script.
Liter Antiqua was born early in the 15th century when a group of Italian humanists developed a tidy elegant hand modeled on Carolian minuscule. They thought they were imitating the handwriting of the ancient Romans and this assumption combined with easy legibility made the humanist script popular in manuscripts of classical texts. When printers adopted it, they maintained the convention of pairing humanist minuscule lowercase letters with capitals inspired by ancient inscriptions. This is essentially the system still used by all Roman fonts today. At the turn of the 16th century when Venice was the center of European printing, the premier printer of classical texts was Aldis Manutius, otherwise famous for his role in standardizing the use of the comma and
semicolon. Aldis produced both expensive folio editions of Greek and Latin authors for scholars and more modestly priced octavo handbooks for the educated public. All were printed in a beautifully designed humanist type face. Thanks in part to Aldis' influence, Roman fonts steadily displaced their Gothic predecessors everywhere outside the Germanic countries. The Aldine designs were imitated and refined most famously by Clude Garamon and Robera Granjon whose fonts were the most popular in Europe for nearly 200 years. Times New Roman designed by Stanley Morrison in 1931 was modeled on the Roman fonts of Robert Granjon. It was meant to be compact but clear, distinctive without being jarring. It was intended, in short, to feel familiar
and subtly recall the grand tradition of Renaissance Roman fonts. On both counts, it succeeded. In a sense, Times New Roman is not quite half Roman since none of its lowercase letters and only 23 of its capitals are directly modeled on ancient forms. But more broadly, it's all Roman, a direct descendant through countless generations of the original Latin alphabet. You can support my work, all written of course in Times New Roman, on Patreon, linked in the description. Another link in the description leads to a page with all the details of my October trip to Greece, which will visit Athens, Sparta, and fascinating sites between. Finally, you'll also find links to my other YouTube channels, Tolden Stone Footnotes, and Synic Roots to the
Past. Thanks for watching.
