The J Ournal of Typographic Research Volume III, Number 2, April 1969

The J ournal of T ypographic Research Volume III, Number 2, April 1969 115- 126 Letterform R esearch Needs Definition and Direction A Report from the Editor 127- 144 Type Variation and the Problem of Cartographic Type Legibility-Part One Barbara S. Bartz 145-168 Clues to a Letter's Recognition: Implications for the Design of Characters Paul A. K olers 169- 182 Visual-motor Skills: Response Characteristics and Pre-reading Behavior Katherine P. DiMeo 183- 192 A Standard Code for Special Typographic Character Identification Stanley Rice 193- 196 Excerpt: Typography That Makes the Reader Work Joel A. Roth 197-208 Book R eviews Fernand Baudin: H. D. L. Vervliet, Sixteenth-century Printing Types of the Low Countries Colin Banks: J an Tschichold, Asymmetric Typography Ruari McLean: David Diringer, The Alphabet 209-212 Correspondence 213- 215 Abstracts ofj ournal Articles in French and German 216 The Authors The Journal of Typographic Research, Volume III, Number 2, April 1969. Published quarterly (January, April, july, and October) by theJoumal, c/o The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA 44106. Copyright © 1969 by The Journal of Typographic Research. Second-class postage paid at Cleveland, Ohio, and at additional mailing offices. Dr. Merald E. Wrolstad, Editor and Publisher Correspondence on editorial matters should be addressed to the editor, cfo The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 44 106. EDITO RIAL B OARD Fernand Baudin, Bonlez par Grez-Doiceau, Belgium Pieter Brattinga, Form Mediation International, Amsterdam John Dreyfus, M ono type Corporation, et al. Dr. William T. H agestad, Saint Louis University Dr. Randall P. H arrison, Michigan State University Dr. G. W. Ovink, Lettergieterij Amsterdam Dr. Donald E. Payne, Marplan, New York City Dr. Christopher Poulton, Applied Psychology Research Unit, Cambridge, England Philippe Schuwer, Editor and Art Director, Paris Dr. Miles A. Tinker, Emeritus Professor, University of Minnesota Dr. Dirk W endt, Psychologisches Institut, Hamburg Dr. R ichard H . Wiggins, Louisiana State University Dr. Bror Zachrisson, Director, Grafiska Institutet, Stockholm ADVISORY C O UNCIL R ev. Edward M . Catich, Saint Ambrose College C.]. Duncan, University ofNewcastle upon Tyne Eugene Ettenberg, Columbia University Ephraim Gleichenhaus, ICTA Representative, New York Ernest H och, ICOGRADA Representative, London Dr.J. K. H vistendahl, AEJ/GAD Representative, Iowa State University Alexander Lawson, Rochester Institute ofTechnology R . Hunter Middleton, Ludlow T ypograph Company Jack W. Stauffacher, The Greenwood Press, San Francisco Hermann Zapf, Frankfurt am Main Business Correspondence : Correspondence about subscriptions, advertising, and other business matters should be addressed to the publisher, see address above. Subscription Rates: Institutional subscriptions are $10.00 a year (72/-; DM40 ; Fr.50; Fl.36; Lira 6,250; Yen 3,620). I ndividual subscriptions a re $6.00 a year (43/- ; DM24; Fr.30 ; Fl.21 ; Lira 3,750; Yen 2, 170). Foreign airmail postage $6.00 extra per year. Manuscripts: An Author's Guide for the organization, preparation, and submission of manuscripts to The Journal of Typographic Research is available from the editor. Included are examples for preparing references, foo tnotes, tables, etc., plus special instructions for designers. Reviews and books for review should also be addressed to the editor. Letterform Research Needs Definition and Direction A Report from the Editor With this its tenth issue, the total number of pages published in The Joumal of Typographic Research passes 1,000. This milestone would seem to provide the opportunity for a report on the J ournal and on current letterform research. The most obvious fact about letterform research today is its pro- liferation. R esearch has been going on since at least the early nine- teenth century; a few scholar-printers and the occasional psychologist have over the past century and a half been interested (almost exclu- sively) in the history and legibility of printing types. Today, develop- ments in a variety of areas are revealing implications for investigation undreamed of only a generation ago. Research on letterform problems is flourishing in areas of education, psychology, engineering, bibliography, linguistics, archeology, highway safety, electronics, cartography, architecture, graphic design, documentation, mass communications, aesthetics, the visually handicapped, poetry, art history, advertising/journalism, painting & sculpture. Encouraging as this "twigging phenomenon" may be in the ex- pansion of over-all envolvement by science & technology, the humanities, and the arts in letterform investigation, it is not without its problems. In an effort to provide some perspective on these problems, imagine that we were to ask an outside scientist- one who is unaware that our nebulous research area even exists- to examine and to report on the current "state of the art." We would guess that his first question might be: "] ust how is your research effort organized?" Our response would have to be, "As a matter of fact, it isn't!" There are two obvious indications of our lack of organization: fi rst, letterform research is an academic orphan. Second, letterform research has no professional research body (such as the International Reading Association). 11 5 Perhaps the most damaging effect of our not having an established academic home is that the direction and progress ofletterform research has remained completely dependent on other disciplines. The choice of research problems has been left to chance interest by indi- viduals whose major concern is oriented elsewhere. The psychologist, the engineer, and the reading specialist when investigating letterform problems are not, in a very real sense, working in letterform research per se. They are working in psychology, in electronics, and in education. Understandably, members of an established research discipline are primarily interested in communicating directly with their peers within that discipline. The result, however, is frustration for any attempt to bring these interests together into some form of over-all organization ofletterform research. Because the research tends to be directed internally within separate disciplines, results go unreported and unrecorded as letterform research, and their significance for us is lost. The J ournal has a fi le of articles from psychological journals that report on experimental work in which letterforms were an integral part of the study but were ignored as a specific topic of research interest. (The responsibility for establishing the essential difference between psychological research on letterforms and letterform research in psychology does not rest with psychology; it rests with us. ) Equally disturbing is the fact that as separate satellite research areas develop- with no over-all organization ofletterform research to refer to for a review of pertinent literature-each one, in turn, begins anew. Following prescribed scientific methodology, each area concentrates first on the most obvious, most easily approached problem areas; research multiplies on obsolete and overworked problems. The sophisticated, theoretical problems which would develop natur- ally out of a co-operative " multi-disciplinary" attack on letterform research are delayed indefinitely. In so diverse a field, the problem becomes one of establishing a research priority, of seeking out the right questions : "A society of change influences its patterns of inquiry by putting a premium on the formulation of new questions and, in general, on the synthetic aspects of knowing. Such a society is by description one that probes at scientific and intellectual frontiers, and a scientific frontier (according to the biologist C. H. Waddington) is where 'we encounter problems about which we cannot yet ask sensible questions.' When change 116 is prevalent, in other words, we are frequently in the position of not knowing just what we need to know. A goodly portion of the society's intellectual effort must then be devoted to formulating new research questions orreformu- latingold ones in the light of changed circumstances and needs so that inquiry can remain pertinent to the social problems that knowledge can alleviate. Three consequences follow. First, there is a need to re-examine the knowledge already available for its meaning in the context of the new questions. This is the synthetic aspect of knowing. Second, the need to formulate new questions coupled with the problem-orientation, as distinct from the discipline-orientation, requires that answers be sought from the intersection ofseveral disciplines. This is the impetus for current emphasis on the importance of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary inquiry as a supplement to the academic research aimed at expanding knowledge and training scientists. Third, there is a need for further institutionalization of the function of transferring scientific knowledge to social use ...." 1 One of the unfortunate results of the parochialism discussed above is the damper it puts on constructive criticism among the research areas. There is a lack of scientific excitement, no cross-fertilization of insights, no clash of ideas. The yeast is missing! A recent article in The New York Times reported that interanimal memory transfer is "a subject of burning dispute and hot pursuit in psychological laboratories everywhere." While we certainly do not have any theoretical breakthroughs to match interanimal memory transfer, can

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