Type & Paper – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1946

Type & Paper is the first in a series of five booklets written and designed by Carl Dair for The E. B. Eddy Paper Company. Using five type families to represent the five basic classifications; Caslon (Old Style), Bodoni (Modern), Futura (Sans Serif), Stymie (Square Serif), and Lydian (Calligraphic), Dair discusses the characteristics of each family; how they change appearance when reversed out of coloured backgrounds or when used with various screen effects, as well as how they look when combined with different display faces.

In the mid 1940s this kind of practical detailed information about typefaces and how they functioned, especially in typical day-to-day circumstances, was hard to find. Within a few years these monographs were being used as text books in some well-known schools, including the Institute of Design in Chicago and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Both Type & Paper and Design for Printing were so popular that second printings were soon required. – CTA

Artifact Text

On the inside front cover there is a quote on the origins of the ampersand from the American type designer Frederick W. Goudy:
What’s an ampersand?
“An ampersand! What in Sam Hill is an ampersand? This question is frequently asked. Indeed, the number of readers otherwise well informed who do not know the word itself, or its meaning, is surprisingly large. “I could of course, say to the enquirer that the word ‘ampersand’ is a corruption of the mixed English and Latin phrase ‘and per se and’ … the name of the sign & which is a monogram of the two letters e, t, of the Latin word et, or in English, and, I usually say ‘it is a short form and,’ and let it go at that.” — Frederick W. Goudy.

Dair also explains the origin of the large brush lettered ampersand he drew for the cover: The ampersand used on the cover is redrawn from one written in a pardon issued by King Henry VI in 1446, where the et form is still dominant.