Masonic Typography

Typography is having a renaissance on the Web, but perhaps one day we’ll reach the level of beauty in this signature line in Bristol Cathedral from a master stonemason, carved in to marble in 1780:

Oblique capitals for the stonemason’s initial “J”, oblique small caps for his surname “Bacon”, a lowercase italic “fecit” (meaning ‘made it’) and a regular weight lowercase for “London 1780”. Wow.

Sharing a bottle of fruit cider with a stonemason the Friday before last, we lamented the computer–assisted carving of inscriptions. In the last decade or so, stonemasons are being replaced with machines who, for the grand sum of £2 per letter, will render any text required into stone with perfect accuracy. Not a lot of flare and soul, but a heap of inhuman precision.

Could they carve the superscript “d” with the dot for the 3rd like line above, though? Maybe so, but then, for anyone who creates anything, there’s a very specific joy in the path taken to create it. It’s completely different to the pleasure in the end product. Perhaps that joy is what is sometimes missing from our pixilated workspace. Tapping a keyboard is an entirely different aesthetic experience than holding a chisel, or a pen.

Perhaps, like many of the master crafts people working in commercial letterpress printing, master masons will slowly retire with no–one to take up the torch apart from a few enthusiasts. We might lament the loss of such skill, or there might be a revival just in time, as the beauty of the art is fashionable appreciated again.

For my part, I’ve promised my new cider drinking partner a commission for stone signage outside any offices Grow might acquire in the next few years. It will go perfectly with the letterpress stationary we’ve just ordered. With luck, it might even be around above an old office building for folks like me to wonder at after another 230 years, like the inscriptions above.