M is for Mantinia

Mantinia is an electronic font. Never existed in metal. Existed in stone and paint, but never in metal (unless retrospectively). It was, in short, born digital. Typographer Matthew Carter designed Mantinia as a tribute to the Paduan painter and printmaker, Andrea Mantegna (1430/31-1506). Mantega for his part was a passionate antiquarian, which in the fifteenth century meant that he was fascinated with imperial Roman architecture, history, and . . . inscriptions.

Mantegna
Mantegna was from Padua, where he was privileged to study at the city’s renowned university (founded 1222), but he spent most of his career in Mantua. His panels, murals and prints all display his interest in classical themes, architectural styles and motifs. He is probably best remembered for his painting of the dead Christ, seen in forced perspective from foot level. A great example of his painted inscriptions can be found in his series, Triumphs of Caesar, which Charles I acquired for the British royal collection. The series now lives at Hampton Court Palace. (At right: Mantegna exhibition poster, 2006-2007).

This (at left) is the second segment of Triumphs of Caesar (1484-92) and the detail depicts standard bearers in a triumph, or military procession (complete with vanquished foes and booty), honoring Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. As a humanist, Mantegna took great interest in classical forms, and his focus on Roman letterforms displays a fine taste for the most refined Roman inscriptions. As a proper Renaissance artist, he was very much concerned with the task of resurrecting interest in Classical forms (including letterforms) from architectural sources, rather than from Gothic textual scripts that were more prevalent in manuscripts of the fifteenth century. He was particularly interested in the initial letters, opening verse or inscriptions with a bold design statement and setting the tone for the text to follow.

On the five-hundredth anniversary of Mantegna’s death in 2006, Mantegna’s three cities (Padua, Verona, Mantua) each hosted exhibitions of the artist’s work. Fittingly, the advertisement text was set in Matthew Carter’s Mantinia. A large, three-dimension letter “M” (set in Mantinia, naturalmente) was erected outside each venue (and stood about six feet high and pictured at right in Damiano Daresta’s exquisite photo). Also stenciled on the streets of Mantua as breadcrumbs, leading visitors to the three exhibition sites, were red Mantinia Ms.

Image: “Mantova Metafisica” by Damiano Daresta (K551 Jupiter on Flickr)
Taken on November 12, 2006, at the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua
Used with permission.
Do not reproduce without first obtaining permission from the photographer.

Matthew Carter designed Mantinia in 1993 as a titling font, which means that it was meant to function like, well, an Imperial Roman inscription: bold statements, full of weight and power. Mantinia is an all-capital font. Carter is quite the erudite typographer, and the pamphlet he designed to accompany and demonstrate the intricate possibilities of the Mantinia font is rife with his own scholarship on Mantegna’s antiquarianisms. He also designed the lovely font, Galliard (for which he is probably best known). Its italic and Mantinia complement one another beautifully. He designed a number of alternate characters, raised capitals, tall capitals, ligatures, and even ornaments for Mantinia that give the type designer a whole range of juicy possibilities. Some of his other type designs include: Snell Roundhand, Georgia (which you are reading now, unless your browser has made a substitution), and Sofia.

I’ve created my own red Mantinia M, this one in yarn. For now, it’s another letter in my knitted abecedarium, but I’m saving it as an idea for a bold statement later on. I have, however, used Mantinia letters in another project. I charted a few words to create, well, let’s call it a name tag, on the inside rim of a hat. The original pattern comes from Adrian Bizilia of Hello Yarn. I used her brilliant pattern, “We Call Them Pirates,” but substituted ampersands for skull & crossbones. The pattern is incredibly well conceived and an absolute joy to knit. I’ve now made it three times (but only once with ampersands). Adrian has designed a matching mitten set as well. As of this writing, Ravelry members have made the hat pattern 761 times, which is a measure of how wonderful a pattern it is! Download it for free from the Hello Yarn site. Here is my chart for the ampersand variation of Adrian’s “Pirates” design.

• Mantegna Exhibition
• Image Gallery
• Biography

• Carter & Cone
• Mantinia
• Examples of Mantinia in action (Monotype imaging)

Carter & Mantinia Bib

• “A Typographic Jubilee for Matthew Carter” Typo Magazine
• Margaret Re, ed. Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.
• Alec Wilkinson, “Man of Letters; Onward and Upward with the Arts” The New Yorker. Vol. 81, No. 39 (Dec 5, 2005): 56.
• J. Abbott Miller, “Matthew Carter: Gentleman Typographer” (American Institute of Graphic Arts)
• Matthew Carter bio (DT&G Magazine)
• Matthew Carter bio (Design Museum)
• “The Subtle Art of Matthew Carter,” Wired.com (1995)

K is for Kelmscott

I have long wanted to knit a William Morris design, but have yet to find a pattern. This “K” is my first, embryonic attempt to pay homage to Morris through a knitting pattern, and of course, I’ve done it in Fair Isle (of course, because Fair Isle is my preferred knitting “medium” and of course, because I have more colors of Shetland yarn than any other weight in my stash; they’re my tubes of ink).

Rather than taking inspiration from one of his many sumptuous designs from natural sources, I’m using this letter as a way to explore Morris’s typographic design ideas. I’m not sure where this is going to lead me, so it’s just a sketch for now. It is based on one of the Kelmscott Press marks (right), which appeared in his own work, Well at the World’s End (1896).

Kelmscott is the location (on the Thames) of the 15th- century manor house (left) in Oxfordshire that William Morris lived in from 1871 until his death in 1896. It is now a historic house museum and open to the public. The home of the Kelmscott Press was in Hammersmith, but Kelmscott was a center of artistic production and creative energy for the 25 years Morris lived there and hosted many of the literary and artistic luminaries of his day. Morris featured his Kelmscott home as the frontispiece to his Utopian novel, News from Nowhere, 1893. That wood engraving (by C. H. Gere), is pictured above, at right. Morris imagined Kelmscott as a center of craftsmanship where artisans would congregate and produce artistic creations not for money, but for joy.

The text and many images of News from Nowhere have been digitized and made available by the University of Iowa Libraries’ Morris Online Edition.


Morris delved into the world of letterpress printing in 1891, well into his spectacular career, and just five years before his death. He named his press after his home, and it proved to be one of the most successful of his many businesses, and certainly one of his most celebrated accomplishments. The sine qua non of the press was the richly–decorated edition of Chaucer’s works, illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones in a series of 87 wood engravings. In addition to printing a number of exquisite books, the Kelmscott Press became known for its typography. Morris and his unofficial partner, Sir Emery Walker, studied the very early typefaces of the fifteenth century, and produced three seminal typefaces: Golden (designed for a re-print of William Caxton’s 1483 edition of The Golden Legend), Troy (named for the Press’s edition of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, also a Caxton re-print), and Chaucer. Several Kelmscott fonts are available in electronic form (see below). Chaucer and Troy are basically the same font, but in different sizes.

ORRIS also took great pains to create elaborate initials (usually wood engravings), a demonstration of his interest in medieval craftsmanship. Just as early printers added initials to mimic manuscript initial letters, Morris liked to set off the first letter of the first word of a chapter or verse with a decorated initial. Some of these have been collected and are available electronically. Morris commissioned highly-skilled paper makers to create (by hand, of course) lush, white papers for Kelmscott books. Likewise, he looked all over Europe for the most precisely-hued black ink. [Note: the “M” pictured above is Jenson Initials No. 79 (American Type Foundry Specimen Book, 1912) The type design is based on Morris’s work, which is in turn based on the typography of Nicolas Jenson].

Before he became a fine press printer, William Morris was intensely productive in textile design. He not only created designs, he taught himself techniques for weaving carpets and upholstery, making embroideries, and most famously, dyeing. Edward Burne-Jones made a cartoon of Morris demonstrating weaving techniques (right) in 1888. It is said that Morris was so intent upon learning the secret of indigo dye (blue was evidently his favorite color) that he immersed himself—literally—in blue dye for two years. He delivered a memorable lecture, “The Art of Dyeing” in Edinburgh in 1889 (text here, courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive). With all his interest in textile design and fabrication, it seems extraordinary that he never appears to have had any interest in knitting, except as a conveniently evocative verb. I imagine that is because in the late-ninteenth century, knitting was considered a homecraft, something associated not with art but with functionality. Fishermen and fishing communities in Britain produced sweaters; most women learned to knit stockings; but the days of guild-produced, fine knitting were centuries distant and had left little imprint that might attract Morris’s attention. I assume he simply never considered knitting artisanal.

Because I wanted to concentrate on Morris’s printing, rather than his wallpaper or upholstery designs, I chose colors that reflected what might appear in print: creamy whites for the beautiful, handmade Kelmscott papers, red ink for the rubrication found throughout the Kelmscott Chaucer, and a dark, almost-black because although Kelmscott black inks were legendary, I try to avoid flat black in wool (I find it deadens other colors around it). Morris wallpapers and chintzes almost always have a much wider range of colors, which I would like to explore further.

I’m considering patterns based on Morris’s “Pimpernel” (left) & “Willow” (right):

Greatly-Condensed Morris Bib

• Dreyfus, John. Morris and the Printed Book, A Reconsideration of his Views on Type and Book Design in the Light of Later Computer-aided Techniques (London: William Morris Society, 1989).
  
• Parry, Linda, ed. William Morris (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996).
• Peterson, William S. The Kelmscott Press : a History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (University of California Press, 1991).
• Thompson, Paul. The Work of William Morris 3rd ed. (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Further reading

• Kelmscott Chaucer (British Library)
• Kelmscott Press imprints (University of Glasgow Library) [including an image of the colophon for Well at the World’s End (1896), on which I based my knitted K]
• Designs for colored initials by Morris (University of Florida Libraries)

• William Morris Book Designs (William Morris Society)
• William Morris & the Kelmscott Press (Victorian Web)
• Text for many of the books Morris wrote (Project Gutenberg; also: compiled links to Morris texts)

Kelmscott Fonts

• Golden, Troy & ornaments (P22 Type Foundry’s Morris set)
• Morris fonts (Scriptorium)

Morris-inspired Fonts

• Cloister Initials, by Frederic Goudy (FontHaus)
• Amelia, by Ted Staunton (P22 Type Foundry)
• Jenson Initials (Dale Guild Type Foundry)—like Morris’s work, these initials were inspired by Nicolas Jenson’s designs—in metal type, not electronic!
• Jenson, No. 58, also by Ted Staunton (based on Golden Type, in turn based on Jenson’s typography, ca. 1470).

And this gorgeousness:

• Kelmscott, by Carol Sunday (Twist Collective)

C is for Cable

I think of the cable as an elemental part of knitting, perhaps because the pattern abbreviations tend to look like fugitives from the periodic table (P2K4C2P2), but really, because the cable is one of knitting’s core elements. The cable plays an architectural role in knitting at once an intrinsic building block and a decorative element.

Something so basic to knitting, I felt, must have a long history. The real history, we don’t know, but the recorded history is rather recent. The Oxford English dictionary dates the first mention of cable knits to 1882 (in Sophia Caulfeild & Blanche Saward’s Dictionary of Needlework, 1882). Richard Rutt dates the first printed reference to knitting patterns earlier, to 1844 in his History of Hand-Knitting, 1987.

All early references lead—surprisingly—to American sources, and point (as does common sense) to the cable’s visual likeness to nautical ropes. Although we (or I, anyway) tend to associate cable knitting with Aran fisherman sweaters, Richard Rutt takes great pains to explain that the white, Irish pullovers we have all grown up loving were developed in response to a marketing effort in the mid-twentieth century. Even so, some of the most interesting cable patterns evoke a strong connection with Celtic design motifs. Alice Starmore’s examples in her Celtic Collection (1993) come to immediately mind. The “Girl from Auntie” (such an inspired name!) offers some wonderful celtic cable patterns on her site.

More recently, Nora Gaughan has gained recognition as the inspired queen of the cable, especially through her Knitting Nature, 2006. Her intricate cable patterns make even the most die-hard colorist quiver with delight at her incredible sensitivity to texture and architectural pattern.

I wish I could offer a better example of a cabled letter here, because patterns and inspiration certainly exist. I just haven’t done any. The real paradigm for cabled letters can be found in Elsebeth Lavold’s work in charting cables for Viking runes in Viking Patterns for Knitting, 2000. For more details on her work, including a description of her recent exhibition, take a look at her site.

So what is the cabled C-shape pictured above, then? Well, after all the space I’ve devoted to nautical and Celtic allusions, this represents nothing either seaworthy or northern European. It is a detail; full square at left (click to enlarge, if you like). This is a very long-term project that I have been avoiding for reasons better left unwritten. It was meant to be an exploration through cables of iconography in the work of the French realist painter, Jean-François Millet (1814-1875). Perhaps more than any other painter, he celebrated knitting, spinning & shepherding. This particular cable represents his work in the 1850s of faggot-gatherers (Here’s an example, from 1858). It’s meant to evoke the texture of the wood grain. [See: Barbara Walker’s Third Treasury, Woodgrain pattern II, as featured on the Walker Treasury Project]

Here are some other images of the project:

A basketweave cable surrounded by seed stitch and lines of growing wheat to represent Millet’s archetypal Sower. He did many versions, but one of the best known is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, of 1850.



This last square celebrates Standing Spinner (1850-1855, also in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts). It features a latticed spindle with small, circular spinning wheels across the top and bottom. That’s about all I’ve finished. This is going to be a small blanket of some kind at some distant date in the future.