Astronomers can’t set type
The tale of Dr George Van Den Bergh and his misguided attempt to shake up the print industry by introducing a radically different way of typesetting.
Post Second World War, the whole of Europe was looking for a way to find it’s feet financially. Spending cuts were rife, nobody escaped them. It was a time for innovation, people were constantly challenging tried and tested methods. The printing industry was no exception.
Dr George Van Den Bergh was a educator, astronomer and renowned problem solver. He felt the high price of books was having a detrimental effect on Student’s learning as they could not afford educational materials. Many had to share books or borrow dog-eared and incomplete texts from libraries.
As a typographic interloper he saw a problem in white-space. He reasoned that by eliminating white-space in the margins, and setting the type right to the edges he could cram more onto a page decreasing the overall size of the book.
He then turned his attention to leading, he felt the space between lines was wasted as they were only occasionally used by type descenders. By setting the type in Uppercase (hoofdletters), descenders would no longer be an issue. The leading was gradually reduced to the point that it no longer existed.
While denouncing the centuries held belief that extensive copy should not be set in Uppercase for fear of illegibility, Van Den Bergh set about designing seven mockups. The results, not surprisingly, was even Van Den Bergh had to admit were underwhelming. His newspaper proofs were an illegible mess.
Not one to be easily deterred, it was back to the drawing board.
He eventually conceded that leading was a necessary evil and by doing so hit upon the genius idea of taking two columns and interspersing them in alternate lines to make one column. He would manufacture a mechanism that could cover the alternate lines of the first column when it was slid down it would reveal the second column while hiding the first column. It was christened Tweelingdruck.
He had the best of both worlds, the mechanism gave the illusion of leading while cramming the same amount of information onto the page as his previous idea had. Taking the idea further by he later introduced Meerlingdruk (Multi-line) proofs.
His ideas meet with a great deal of criticism, especially among Typographers. Setting type entirely in Uppercase to save vertical space did not sit well at all with the typographic elite. Furthermore they saw the ‘Reading Screen’ Mechanism as costly to manufacture and ineffective if not standardised, which in a free market was unlikely to happen.
From that point on, Van Den Bergh published his own texts in Meerlingdruk, it proved quite useful for multi-language books. Unfortunately it hard to find any examples beyond this.
Hoofdletters and Meerlingdruk was certainly inspired and innovative, it was a novel solution to the problems of post war Europe, but was left wanting because of Van Den Bergh’s typographic naivety.
Sources
I originally discovered this story at Eye Magazine. My article is largely based on that information