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ABOUT

Martha Carothers

Martha Carothers is Professor of Art at the University of Delaware where she teaches book arts, foundation design, and visual communications. Carothers’ book arts often highlight text about books, reading, and typography. Her books are letterpress produced, hand-bound, and computer generated under The Post Press. Carothers' graduate graphic design research at Penn State University focused on pop-up and moveable books. She continues to research conceptual design and illustration in children's books. Carothers was a 2011-2012 Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the City University of Hong Kong.

Speaker at ATypI 2012 Hong Kong: An Alphabet of 26 Symbols. This talk describes the history and discusses the advantages of unicase fonts. In particular, she contrasts ideasof Bradbury Thompson and Beatrice Warde:

• In 1945, Bradbury Thompson, graphic designer and art director, introduced his typographic experiment Monalphabet in the publication Westvaco Inspirations for Printers 152. This experiment suggested the exclusive use of lower-case characters for the 26 letters of the alphabet. To perform the function of capital letters, Thompson prepared large letterforms with altered ascenders and descenders. He implemented these letterforms in a series of typographic experiments. Subsequent to the Monalphabet, Thompson went on to reconsider ascenders and descenders and developed Alphabet 26. This type experiment removed ascender and descender characters and established an alphabet of only 26 symbols for the characters of the alphabet. As such, nineteen characters which varied in appearance between upper- and lower-case were eliminated.
• In 1951, Beatrice Warde, publicity manager for the Monotype Corporation, wrote an essay entitled "The Design of Books". This essay was later published in The Chrystal Goblet, 1956, a compilation of sixteen essays on typography. Warde also probed the utility of upper- and lower-case letters and proposed words "can most efficiently be set forth in the twenty-six simple code-symbols called capitals".

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