Laurie Lewis, a writer and former UTP employee, writes about working with Carl Dair on Design with Type, newly re-released from University of Toronto Press.
I didn’t actually see Carl Dair for the first few months while his book was being negotiated at University of Toronto Press in 1967. But sometimes, from the office of the Director, Marsh Jeanneret, or the Editor, Francess Halpenny, the smell of pipe tobacco would drift through the halls. Then there would be a sudden puff, a cloud, and a shape would swirl through the fog, along the hall, down the stairs, saying “Don’t worry, don’t worry, we’ll get it right,” and the phantom would be gone.
University of Toronto Press had two very skilled typographic designers on staff at the time, and management was becoming aware that typographic design was a rapidly developing field in Canada. Harold Kurschenska, who was a typographer at the printing plant, had nagged the editors until they agreed to meet Carl and read his book. Antje Linger, a fine, European-trained designer, was in the publishing division, doing the classical, scholarly publications of the Press. When University of Toronto Press made their decision to publish Carl Dair’s book, Design with Type, both of them were to be very much involved.
I was a lowly production assistant. Not only was I a recent employee, but a recent immigrant. I had just recently arrived in Toronto from New York and the competitive, commercial publishing world. The serious scholarly pace at U of T Press was new to me and although I was learning that cautious and careful did not necessarily mean dull and plodding, I seemed always to be stirring things up and getting in trouble. Someone was always telling me, “That’s not the way we do it here.” And the production manager once told me, “Insubordination is your middle name.”
But I had never heard of Carl Dair, and the production manager’s irritated musings about the book meant little to me.
“He’s a Communist,” she said. “Everybody knows it. I really don’t know what we will do.”
“Is that what the book is about,” I asked. “Is there a Communist style of typography?”
“Well, no. But … you know. He’ll probably try to get it into the book. Propaganda.”
“Does the editor think it is a Communist book?”
“No, no. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that I don’t know what it’s coming to. A Communist, and our reputation, and everything. What will people think?…”
It seemed to me that a bit of revolution was just what the old place needed along about then. So, long before I met him, I knew that I was going to like Carl Dair.
As it turned out, there was a much more serious publishing problem than whether Carl would somehow insinuate communist propaganda into the book. It was that old capitalist problem, Money. The book would cost too much to produce. Good old “Comrade” Carl insisted that the book be typeset by union typesetters. And because of the illustrations, the book would need to be printed by offset lithography, a relatively new technology at the time. University of Toronto Press had a fully unionized typesetting plant and was in the process of converting to offset, so that wasn’t a problem. The problem was the cost of assembly of camera copy, with all the complex illustrations and colour overlays. Every dollar added to the manufacturing cost of a book translated into an extra three or four dollars in the selling price. It began to look financially impossible.
Carl came to the rescue by offering to do all the page assembly himself. One problem solved! But there was the rather delicate question of union jurisdiction: the procedure was strictly forbidden. One could not take the type repros out of the shop, allow non-union preparation of the artwork, and send the camera copy back into the same shop for printing. The plant would surely go out in strike! But somehow, we were never told how, the problem vanished. It appeared to management that Carl had used his “leftie” connections and arranged some kind of special dispensation. At any rate, the procedure was approved and there was no strike.
Those of us who worked in publishing know that authors frequently want to design their own books, especially the jackets. Some authors seem to feel that they are well qualified book designers. (They tell us that they have always liked books and they have read a lot of them.) In this case, the author/designer blend made perfect sense. Carl planned the book and the layout was approved by all the necessary levels of publishing bureaucracy. Carl marked up a piece of text and a sample page was set, ready for Carl’s approval. Did he approve it? No!
There was just one tiny typographic detail that he felt needed attention. He was troubled by the hyphens that appeared now and then at the ends of lines. It broke the edge of the type, he said, and made a ragged-looking frame. How would it be with a vertical hyphen, he asked. No, no, no! From editor to printer, everyone at the Press was in an uproar. It was impossible, they said. (“It has never been done,” they said.) The reader would think it was the letter “i”. But Carl insisted that we try it – it will make a smoother right edge, he said. Finally, Marsh Jeanneret decided that, as Canada’s typographic authority, Carl should be given a little room to experiment. And so a drawing was made, a punch was cut, and a special Monotype mat was made for casting the new character. When we tried the sample setting with the new character, we found that both publisher and designer were correct. The edge looked better, but a hyphenated word within the line just didn’t read properly. And so a compromise was reached. Within the line, hyphenated words would receive a “normal” (horizontal) hyphen; word breaks at the ends of lines would get a “Dair” (vertical) hyphen. Both sides were happy, more or less.
We counted on the idea that, as readers, we would soon become accustomed to the new character. We believed that by the time we had read a few pages of the text our brains would accepted the vertical hyphen and stop troubling us with an “interference” message. I think Carl firmly believed that his innovative hyphenation would find a place for itself. Now, nearly fifty years later, perhaps it is something of a typographic Edsel.
During the production stages of Design with Type, Carl was in and out of our offices at least a couple of times a week, an energetic fully-grown elf, tweedy and charismatic. Sometimes he took over Antje Lingner’s drawing board to patch up a bit of paste-up – in the days before Macintosh and before scalpels and wax, we all used X-acto knives and rubber cement. It seemed impossible to me that he could actually adjust letter-spacing in 10 point Bembo, cutting out a hair here, putting it in there. He was a real pro, Antje told me. And he returned the compliment, trusting Antje’s eyes and hands as well as he trusted his own.
When the book was ready for printing, the final decision had to be made. How many copies would be printed? All the costing for the book was based on a print run of 5000 copies, as I remember it, but management began to worry about who would actually buy the book. “There can’t possibly be even two thousand people in all of Canada who care about this kind of thing,” was one of the comments. However, the sales people seemed to have faith in the book, and the print run held. Do I need to tell anyone how successful the book has been? I think not.
Carl and I became good friends during our working time together; we corresponded during his time in Jamaica and developed a friendship that continued until his death. As I sit here, inputting this memoir on my Macintosh, I wonder what Carl would have thought about the new technology. Certainly he would have pushed it around a bit to extend its limits. A lot of us old paper-and-pencil designers have done just that. I heard a story recently from another one of Canada’s senior designers who became a convert. “I got on the Mac at 5 o’clock one night, just to do one little thing, I thought. But before I knew it, it was 9:30, and I hadn’t even had my gin and tonic!”
I’m sorry to have to miss celebration of Carl Dair’s book Design with Type, but I will be in Mexico until the end of March. I think Carl would enjoy knowing that his teaching approach in Design with Type is still a wonderful “window” into typographic design. I’m delighted that Design with Type is being re-released to a new generation of designers.
