Posted on http://typographi.ca/000511.php
on February 25, 2003 by Bill troop.
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    Reply to "Is there a "poverty upon modern printing"?
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Yes. There is a poverty. And we gain nothing by not looking at that
fact straight in the eye. Let's focus again on the econmomics and the
history. The early history of the monotype is instructive. When
Morison came on board, he was exceedingly reluctantly accepted.
Monotype was making more than enough money producing more
than enough types that more than satisfied the bulk of its market. It
was a hugely successful company. Yet Morison got it to invest hugely
in new and vastly superior type manufacture, and profits increased
even more. Far more than anything else, Morison was a marketing
genius, the like of which we have yet to see again. But he filled a
historical/ecnomic vaccum which does not exist today.

Today, we are not in this kind of economic position. Today, we have
all the types that 99.9% of the market demands, and we don't have
anyone making any money at it. It is inconceivable that the kind of
investment Morison caused to be made could ever occur again.
Because of Ikarus, and its succeeding technologies, type that satisfies
nearly everyone, and that is cheaply adaptable to nearly any future
technology, has been drawn once and for all, and need never be
drawn again.

There is nothing to fund the huge investment needed for new types
on an aesthetic/technical level with the old monotypes.

Let me give a quick contemporary example: I was recently sent a
book announcement, printed lavishly in a few sizes of metal Bembo.
I almost wept at the optical perfection of each size. I could not
reproduce that in photopol not because of the limitation of photopol,
but because there is no digital font capable of approximating the
Bembo range.

Those fonts don't exist in digital. Therefore, the monotype, in spite
of its vast, ugly limitations, is still a more sophisticated and
technically capable and -- for that matter -- truly modern device, for
obtaining what I want to obtain: the ability to print in a perfectly
graded range of different type sizes. 

Those fonts _could_ exist in digital -- or photo. But they don't. In
fifty post-metal years, we have yet to see a single entity make a range
of size sensitive types that can compare just with this one monotype
metal family. It's not because people don't know how to do it, or
couldn't figure out how to do it if necessary. It's because there isn't
enough money to fund the manufacture -- and this in spite of the
vastly cheaper manufacture of digital/photo as compared to metal.
Yet as cheap as our contemporary processes are, we still do not have
in the fine printing industry enough money to invest in fine type.
Hasn't even Sumner Stone more or less abandoned, or at least
drastically curtailed, his promising work in this direction?

There must be hundreds of photopol printers who would appreciate
a perfectly graded visual type, comparable to the optical
achievements of the best monotype or linotype work. But not one
single type designer/type manufacturer has provided such a thing to
this market. It is simply too expensive to produce. 

Looking forward, I would say that photopol will always be at a
disadvantage when it is compared to metal, or considered as a
replacement for metal. I would say rather that it should be
considered for its own unique characteristics. 

The problem remains that I cannot today print in a range of
well-optimized sizes without going to metal.

If I choose to use photopol, it should be not because I am trying to
replicate metal. It should be because I am trying to do something
else.

I think more than anything else that what I am trying to show here is
that, ever since photo, and the single master, we have seen the rise of
something that was hitherto inconceivable: a single designer
working on a type family. This has become so commonplace that it is
now assumed that all designers work basically alone and do not
need anyone else to work with. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no designer today
who can, alone, create the kind of sophisticated family that was
routinely produced by Mono and Lino at their height. This kind of
work requires a team, and not a small one. There aren't any
shortcuts. But in type manufacture today, there is no way that we can
afford to have a dozen or more people taking a year or two to
produce a single typeface family. 

Recently, Poetry Magazine received a bequest of $100 million,
changing forever the face of one of the most impoverished elements
of the printing industry. Type design would need a comparable
investment in order to bring us up to date with the technical finesse
of the mono/lino families. We are in a technological darkness today.
We have not pro-gressed, we have re-gressed.

I'm not talking tradition here. I'm talking cold technological
capability. Our contemporary types are simply less technologically
capable than their forbears of 80 years ago. As there is no economic
reason to produce fine type (by which I mean type as technically
capable as a monotype family like Bembo or any other of that class),
the only way it can be produced is by patronage.

So where is our patron? Shouldn't someone be trying to organize a
foundation? If we haven't even -- as a group of people who care
about fine type -- the focus to do that -- what _can_ we do?