History of Perpetua Font and Eric Gill

HISTORY OF ERIC GILL

Eric Gill was born in 1882 in Brighton, Sussex. In his early years he frequently drew locomotives that were concentrated on form rathe

r than engineering functions. With his skill of drawing he was enrolled in Chichester Art School were his passion for letter makin

g and art grew. When he was 17 he received a prominent job as an apprentice to W.H. Caroé at Westminster Abbey. While working there he was also taking night classes by a well-known calligrapher Edward Johnston. It was here that he received his first job with typeface designing. He started out working with doing inscriptions on stone but later worked with wood engraved bookplates, and both illustrations and entire alphabets for various presses. Stanley Morison, who

 later requested Gill to create Perpetua, m

et Gill in 1913 at the Catholic Publishing House of Burnes and Oates. Right away Morison had a liking for Gill’s work and ability to engrave smaller letters on wood. Morison and Gill became friends and had many things in common such as; the same religion, self-training themselves and being self-proclaimed experts in everything they attempted. Gill however did not believe in mass production while Morison was a promoter of it. Morison finally convinced him to create a type for a book, which lead to the creation of Perpetua.

         Gill was most well known as a sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter, and printmaker. He married Ethel Hester Moore in 1904 and moved his family to Ditchling in S

ussex, which is where he later created his first successful sculpture called Mother and Child in 1912. Two years later he produced sculptures for Westminster Cathedral. In the next twenty years Gill and his family moved all across the country. In 1925 he designed the typeface Perpetua followed by another typeface, Sans, in 1927. In 1928 he set up a printing press and lettering workshop near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Here he had a number of apprentices, which later became famous in their own ways. In 1938 he was made a Royal Designer for Industry, which is the highest British award for d

esigners, by the Royal Society of Arts and became the founder member of the newly established Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry.

         It was a little-known fact that Gill produced a number of erotic engravings, sexually abused his own children and had an incestuous relationship with his sister. This was all stated in his personal diaries. However he was strongly committed in his faith as a Roman Catholic. When news of his private life came out his personal and artisti

c achievements were reassessed. He became known as one of the twentieth century’s strangest and most original controversialists.

         Gill’s life ended in 1940 when he died of lung cancer at Harefield Hospital in Uxbridge, Middlesex. He was buried in Chilterns, the village where is last artistic community had been practiced. All of his papers and libraries are archived at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA.

 

 WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN 1925?

In 1925, many famous books were published such as The Great Gatsby and Mein Kampf, and the first TV was created. I think the fact that the world was growing in its pop-culture and technological discoveries lead to the dislike that Gill had of mass production. I don’t think however that this had much to do with the production of Perpetua type.

 

 HISTORY OF PERPETUA

In 1924 an essay written by Stanley Morison was directed towards the printers and type founders was calling for a new type for their time. Upon creating this essay Morison had already had an “artist” in mind. The essay was calling for typography based not upon the needs and conventions of renaissance society but upon those of modern England. Morison was the Typographical designer at the Monotype Corporations and had planned to fuse the talents of a living designer of lettering with those of an expert engraver of punches and create a new type design. Morison had chose Eric Gill to design this typeface. Gill was a long time friend of Morison, and had a unique but clean cut style. After some convincing Gill agreed to create a new typeface.

Morison needed a Monotype font and was relatively new at creating it. He had problems with his last typeface that he created, Fournier, so he was taking all the stops out to make sure that this alphabet was a perfectly developed contribution to modern typography. Morison’s obsession with trying to create the perfect type was shown when he demanding the letterforms to be cut in the traditional manner. This manner was called punching, which is where letterforms are punched in and then handled over Monotypes. Morison believed that this would make the type retain its chiseled quality. He also felt that no original from a drawing-board could be satisfactory as a design adapted from existing type. These rules and parameters made it a very boring process for Gill and he later complained about it in his diary. By the end of November 1925, the typeface design of what was to become Perpetua was underway.

Every drawing that Gill designed was worked on by another craftsmen and sent to Gill to look over. In May of 1926 the first set of smoke proofs were sent in 14-pt punches and 12-pt punches were sent to Gill. He only responded with saying that it seemed to be a decent and legible type.

It was said to have been a gamble on Morison’s part, but it was seeming to pay off. However in December of the same year everything started to fall apart. 24-pt punches were sent to Gill for reviewing and he was less than pleased. He said that they were decent but very dull and in themselves good letters but bad type. Morison did not have a choice but had to proceed because Monotype Works had already begun their own trials by January.

         Morison and Gill both had additional changes that they added to the typeface, but the publishers requested the original drawings that Gill had done to be sent to them. Gill had done a drawings of an alphabet both roman and italic. These were later decided to be used, with some altercations made to the italic capitals.

There is confusion to when the italic was actually created but is was completer and used to print the insert of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity for the seventh volume of The Fleuron. Incidentally it was from the insert that the names for the fonts, Perpetua and Felicity italic had come. Not only was this the first viewing of the types, but it also mentioned future availability of a Felicity script. Had this “script” come to fruition it would have followed along nicely with Morison’s prescriptions for an “ideal italic”. This insert was dated 1929 although the edition was not published until November 1930.

In the seventh volume of The Fleuron, you can tell that it is not only a piece praising Eric Gill, but it is also publicity for the new Perpetua type. It says that this type has the ability to bestow beauty and distinction upon books. Full credit for this type was being given to Monotype, but more specifically to Morison.

         In 1931, Perpetua’s sister font, Felicity was rejected and Gill was asked to create a new set of drawings. In 1932, Monotype Perpetua and Felicity italic were finally released to the printing trade. Gill had been a lettering artist but until this time had had no experience with the creation of type. If Gill’s original drawings, that were only created with ink and a brush were still in existence, it would be easier to measure the amount of work that the technicians actually put into the type.

It had been Gill’s first typeface creation and Morison’s first “modern” design for Monotype. Morison’s whole goal for this creation was to have an ideal type that was worthy of a permanent place in the history of typography.

Perpetua is classified as a Transitional font. Transitional fonts are a subcategory of Serif style fonts. Transitional fonts exhibit a marked increase in the variation of stroke weight and a more horizontal serif compared to Old Style, but not as extreme as Modern. Perpetua is classified under this mostly because of its high stroke contrast and bracketed serifs.