Beard of the Week XXIX: A Lovely Face
This week's honorary beard — his mustache, actually — belongs to Bruce Rogers.
Rogers' name will be unfamiliar to most except for certain connoisseurs, in this case aficionados of typefaces, by whom his name is venerated. Rogers was born in Lafayette, Indiana in 1870 and died in 1957. To say that he is a renowned typographer is accurate but woefully inadequate. To my eye he was an artist of exquisite taste and creativity.
Among other reasons I celebrate his name, he was the designer of what is undoubtedly my favorite typeface, known as Centaur. It is an elegant, finely cut Roman face with serifs, so graceful that it nearly takes my breath away. You can see examples online,* but such small samples give no hint of the beauty of the face when used to set a book. When you see an entire page set in Centaur you can begin to appreciate its poise and balance, enjoy its light touch of color on the page, and marvel at how the page's own color meanders so gently through its characters. I've used it for a couple of printing projects that I thought deserved it, and still marvel at the effect: it's beautiful and eminently readable, and works equally well as a titling face and as a book face.
The most famous use for Centaur, and justifiably Rogers' most famous printing project, was the Oxford Lectern Bible, a folio-sized book printed by Oxford in 1935 in an edition of only 1,000 impressions. I haven't found yet any good online images of pages from that edition, although there is an image of the title page from the University of Delaware's copy. Libraries are justifiably proud when they're able to add a copy of this famous book to their collection. (Here's the full citation from the National Library of Australia catalogue.)
While I was looking for some information about the Oxford Lectern Bible, I ran across a page described as a "prospectus" for an "Arion Press Folio Edition" of the Bible, which had this to say about Rogers' design (which they call one of the three important among the 16 "landmark" bibles of the past 500 years):
The Oxford Lectern Bible, designed by the celebrated American book and type designer Bruce Rogers (1870-1957) and published in 1935, is generally regarded as the greatest piece of printing in the twentieth century. Rogers modified his own Centaur type in the 22-point size for more compact setting. The resulting pages are spectacular and flawless. Double-column is used throughout. The page size varies: 16 by 12 inches for the standard edition of 1,000 copies, fitting the brass lecterns of Anglican churches, 18-1/4 by 13 inches for the large-paper edition of 180 copies, and 19-1/4 by 14 inches for the unique copy in the Library of Congress.
Calling it "the greatest piece of printing in the twentieth century" doesn't equivocate much, does it?
It may be hard for one to arrange to see in person an Oxford Lectern Bible, but one can get a nice idea about Rogers' style through a charming little book by him called Paragraphs on Printing (New York : Dover Publications, 1980; reprint of first edition, New York : William E. Rudge's Sons, 1943), which he wrote and designed. It is at the moment still in the Dover Catalog, and still costs only $6.95, if you can believe it!
Awhile back I tripped over an online exhibit (an analog of a physical exhibit from 2003) at The Minnesota Center for Book Arts, called "Bruce Rogers : Designer of Books". It's a cozy exhibit and I can recommend that you take the ten minutes to click through it. A short biography — which was the source of this photo — of Bruce Rogers accompanies the exhibit. The online photographs of the exhibit, displaying title pages, covers, and pages of text from many of the books designed by Roger, are quite lovely, particularly the photos and notes about the Oxford Lectern Bible that was exhibited.
You might also enjoy this article: "Bruce Rogers and His Centaur", Harvard Magazine (online only), September-October 2006.
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* Two pages with some inadequate samples of the face are Wikipedia's entry for the Centaur typeface, and the Linotype page on the Centaur Font Family.