Mad, abandoned, the Jumbo Press is revolutionizing the printing world-turning it upside down and topsy turvy, exposing all its hoodoo-voodoo, and divesting its weird ceremonies of all their glamour. Jumbo stripped the mask from typography’s Medicine-Men and their disciples have seen them as they are:-pompous tottering pretenders, mouthing conceits and sweating decadence.
Jumbo
This is not because the effect thus achieved is novel and thereby striking in appearance, but because of the beautiful logic of such procedure. Consider these things, ladies, and allow those qualities so peculiar to the female- courage, imaginativeness, adaptability, & the will to experiment- oh give them their head and let the results be caustic, spangled pages of type shot thru the heavens of paper and ink. Do not like mimicking memory-doped moppets chanting ‘i before e except after c’ waste precious hours syllablizing and wrinkling your petty little brows. Now that the first shock is over do you not read this normal ease? (allright allright, but Gutenberg himself could not have gotten that question mark on the end of that line). A summary of this important tenet now follows in simple jingle form for the youngsters:
“Either rape your words without shame or abash-- For a hypen is at best an emasculated dash- Or a lionhearted printer you had better be And let the letters fall according to their destiny.”
End of Tenet Number One
Technique and the fallacy of its overemphasis. It is allright to know the names of the types & to be able to recognize them at a glance; and it may be a great satisfaction to know the mathematics and theory of type sizes. But it is folly to waste much time on all this. What goes with Garamond? Anything and everything. Bodoni? Well that’s different; Bodoni goes out of the window. But a fine page should have on it, for instance, Goudy black letter, Italian Oldstyle italic, Garamond large caps, and a Centaur ampersand; then in rapid succession, Caslon Janson Deepdene, Poliphilus Lutetia- and so on until the page is full. Printers sound like this as they meditate over the ‘design’ of a title page (always a title page; very few printers bother to meditate over a text page):
“How does this look?”
“Superb, Jo, superb. Too bad those types don’t go together so we could use it.”
Jumbo herself suffers from the condescension of her mate-a lordly fellow- who a long time ago mastered the works & biographies of all the printers since the beginning of printing. He can also spot the name of a type and spit on the dot of its eye ten yards away. Also this marvelous male periodically corners Jumbo and rattles off a terrifying group of figures evidently designed to demonstrate with what ease a person, providing he has inside information, can use certain sizes of spaces with different size type and they will fit. Something like that. For Jumbo’s part, she roots around until she finds something she wants. And with what a glad & mighty trumpet call is it welcomed! The rafters tremble with the sound of the little elephant’s joy.
“Don’t be tied down like dunces and fools To quads ems picas and man made rules. In this kind of trif-eling, let the male wallow, For a women the freedom of wind and of swallo
End of Tenet Number Two
The greatest thrill the Reader has is margin-marking. He rips through a book especially if he is a printer, crossing out an ‘o’ here, putting in a ‘t’ there - even in places jotting THIS IS NOT TRUE!!!!! With a flourish. If he is not a printer, he will make broad assertions about typography too. If he is a printer, he will say there is not enough ink or there is too much. If he has the true spirit of the collector (predominantly a male affliction), he will sit down and write a long letter to the printer smugly noting all errors & ending wistfully, ‘These are only a few of the more serious mistakes; time does not permit the listing of them all.’ He means he hasn’t found any more of course, but leave him be. It is a rather quaint pastime for people these days. The idea that anything so harmless could amuse a fairly large group of humans in this age of sinister pleasure should be encouraged. “The kindly printer lets things be- Hark to some Jumbo philosophy:
“From other elephants this one differs This elephant always forgets The mistakes she makes and the shocking spacing On every page she sets.”
End of Tenet Number Three