This essay is about the contribution that typing manuals and typists have made to the history of graphic language and communication design, and that typewriter composition has played in typographic education and design practice, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The limited technical capabilities of typewriters are discussed in relation to the rules in typing manuals for articulating and organizing the structure of text. Such manuals were used to train typists who went on to produce documents of considerable complexity within what typographers would consider to be minimal means in terms of flexibility in the use of letterforms and space.
…Typing manuals and the relentless repetition of typing exercises in class formed the basis of this training, and generations of office workers acquired considerable knowledge about the visual organization of often complex documents. In the context of the history of typography, typewriter operators (typists, as they became known) were designing within ‘minimal means’. They worked with a restricted range of letterforms and character sets, and with limited flexibility for manipulating vertical and horizontal space. The documents they made—in their material form—were true to the limitations of the machines that made them. Designers and educators also exploited the characteristics (and limitations) of typewriters in their work; in the 1950s and 1960s especially, typewriters were regarded by designers as one of the tools of the trade, though perhaps, as Ken Garland has noted, ‘a design tool that is not usually regarded as such’.2 Design educators such as Norman Potter and Michael Twyman used the limitations of typewriter composition to good effect in teaching typography. And because typing manuals were concerned with the kind of document that Herbert Spencer, in 1952, called ‘utility’ printing (‘technical catalogues, handbooks, timetables, stationery and forms, the primary purpose of which is to inform’3), the typewriter as the means of production for such documents has a place in the history of document design and, by inference, of information design.4 ‘Typewriter composition’ was prevalent in the printing trade in the 1960s and 1970s and many typists who trained on mechanical typewriters went on to become ‘compositors’, working with electric machines such as the IBM 72, the IBM Executive, the Justowriter and later models of the Varityper.5 In this context typists assumed the role of compositor, applying rules acquired through typing training to typesetting in books
…Typewritten material, on the whole, was monochrome, but some document types typically required the used of a second color to fulfil a particular function. Typing in colors other than black involved either the use of colored carbon paper, special 2-colour or 3-colour attachments, or a bi-chrome or tri-chrome ribbon. Red, the preferred second color, was recommended for emphasis and particular words in a text, and was referred to in Pitman’s Typewriter Manual: A practical guide to all classes of typewriting work in 1897 [1909 edition] as ‘variegated typewriting’.46 In the typing of plays, for example, underlining in red was prescribed to denote non-spoken elements, such as stage directions, as shown in the illustration Figure 6. However, as affirmed in Pitman’s Typewriter Manual,47 in recognition of the fact it was time-consuming to do, typists were encouraged to do the red ruling with a pen or pencil—a pragmatic solution. Later typing manuals proposed that when a typewriter was fitted with a red-black bi-chrome ribbon, the non-speaking parts in a play should be typed in red (with no underlining)—an example of simplicity of operation changing conventional practice.
