The Golden Thread

Section of the dedication stone to Athena Polias, 334 BCE. The letters are around 2.5 cm tall.
The typographer Stanley Morison singled out this inscription for containing the first dated occurrence of serifs.

The earliest traces of the alphabet have been found on a cliff-face full of graffiti near a harsh desert highway in the Wadi el-Hol (the Terrible Valley) that cuts through the desert between Abydos and Thebes in Upper Egypt (Fig. 4). The discoverers of these simple, yet undeciphered, inscriptions were John and Deborah Darnell – Egyptologists from Yale. When they found the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions in 1993, they immediately recognized certain forms from the Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite script associated with earliest alphabetical writing in the Sinai peninsula and further north into Canaanite territory in Syria-Palestine that dated from 1600 BCE onwards.

The evolution of key letters in old Roman cursive into new Roman cursive

His tapestries too blend influences from the Secessionist Oskar Kokoschka’s lettering (clearly the inspiration for Koch’s Neuland typeface)

Larisch’s theories on lettering emphasized writing as a performance, with rhythm as an important feature. For this reason he advocated the use of block letters, so popular in Secessionist art, for this form could be stripped of historical associations and the awkward stresses of edged penmanship, which can interrupt the flow of the writer.

Rudolf von Larisch (1856–1934) in Vienna and Rudolf Koch (1876–1934) in Offenbach near Frankfurt, stand out as key influences. They, along with Johnston, determined the shape of European calligraphy for the majority of the twentieth century.

Tamara Plakins Thornton points out in her book Handwriting in America

Figgins (1830) called his type a sans-serif. Thorowgood (1832) called his a grotesque (from the Italian grottesco meaning of the grotto or cave), and both terms remain in use today.

The other great revival of the late eighteenth century was the letter with no serifs at all, the stoic sans-serif, the ancient Roman republican letterform. This monoline block letter would eventually eclipse all its rivals and become one of the most popular choices for new type designs in the twentieth century.

encourage this stability Lewis, Carstairs and Foster all advocated the use of bindings (Fig. 48), elaborate ribbons that tied the hand in the correct position on to the pen; writers might also be tied to their chairs to ensure correct posture.