Trajan

Typefaces appeal to me. In an odd series of events while in high school I learned the printing trade. It was more of a pastime for me but it did provide sustenance during various times in my life. One time when I matriculated to Southern Illinois University and miscalculated my finances, I opened the school newspaper’s want ads to look for a job. 

There was a notice asking for a small offset printer operator (this was before ubiquitous copy machines) for the newspaper. I obtained an interview with the massive chain smoking master printer. I introduced myself and he led me to the shop. There on an equally massive paper cutter was a disheveled reem of paper. I instinctively picked it up, fanned the pages restoring order to it and set it carefully back on the cutter’s surface. He said your hired and walked out.

 

Many classical typefaces are based on script chiseled into various Roman Ruins. The most famous being Trajan’s column in Rome. As you can see, this type is all capitals and is often referred to as “capitalis monumentalis”. Capitals date to 43 BC. 

 

They have been lost and rediscovered countless times over the centuries. Many scholars and craft people have struggled to decipher their magic. They were chiseled into rock., carved into wood, drawn freehand, set into type and programed into software. 

 

As you can imagine, considering the millennia they have existed there are a cast of interesting characters that comes along with reading about the Capital’s history. There is also a quest to reduce Trajan’s inscription to a geometric formula, to divine its proportionality. 

 

There was Walter Kaech from Germany, a graphic designer, craftsman and scholar that wrote four books detailing the superiority of Roman letters. There was the multidimensional Catholic priest, Father Catich, who due to his Chicago sign painting past, when he was posted to Rome for four years became obsessed with the Trajan Inscription and wrote two scholarly volumes about them. And there is Carol Twombly, a graduate of The Rhode Island School of Design, who digitally replicated the Trajan Capitals. 

 

To that end rubbings, cast, reproductions, drawings, and photos have been made repeatedly. some of the rubbings are quite famous and are housed in renown research libraries. Some believe the capitals only come alive if they are chiseled, carved or hand drawn. Many used the capitals as raw material for their own font creations. I am composing this short essay in Word’s Trajan Pro (12 point) and I am delighted to have the choice to choose from hundreds of fonts at the click of a finger.

 

Maybe, if you have gotten this far, I have inspired you to look, as you would with a fine painting or sculpture, at the letters on the page. Someone, somewhere had to create everything we see, hear, taste, feel . . . relish in it.