Inspiration from the Past

If there’s one move in Bible design I have no patience for, it’s the slavish reiteration of past formats. But that doesn’t mean I have no use for the past. In fact, in my book, the best new examples of modern Bible design take inspiration from historical sources. The key is to make the right use of the tradition.

At the founding of the Society of Bible Craftsmanship during the Museum of the Bible’s August 27, 2022 Bible Craftsmanship Conference, I gave a wide-ranging talk on “Curating the Future of Bible Design.” Trying to capture some of the excitement of what’s happening today in Bible publishing, I made the point that inspiration from the past can shape the future.

To illustrate the point, I cited two examples from the work of Klaus Krogh at 2K/Denmark, in part because they both fascinate me and in part because Klaus was in the room with me and could refine my observations as needed. Before I get to that, however, pardon a brief digression.

Immediately before my talk, Klaus and I did a quick presentation on The Comfort Print Story, a large-format book showcasing seven different typefaces created by 2K/Denmark for HarperCollins Christian Publishing to give a distinct typographic identity to the publisher’s family of publications. This book offers unparalleled insight not only into the development of the typefaces but also into the design of a whole series of recent Bibles. It’s rare to see the process opened up in this way — in fact, I have tried in vain to think of anything similar. Most of the insight I have into the projects I’ve written about, for example, comes through reverse engineering, examining the finished product and working backward. As I explained to Klaus over a late-night coffee, a lot of what I think I know is only hardened speculation (insightful speculation, I hope). If my inferences are later confirmed (as they often, but not always are), that’s wonderful, but for the most part the best a commenter can do is make an informed guess. Even people on the inside may not have a perfect grasp of what went down. Relatively little is written down after the fact. So for me, flipping through this large format book and soaking up the descriptions of how these designs came into being is a rare delight.

At the conference, I also had the pleasure of spending some time with Tim Wildsmith of Bible Review Blog fame, who produced a great walk-through video of The Comfort Print Story, which you can watch here:

As I was pressed for time during the talk, I could not quite go into as much detail as I would have liked, so that’s what I propose to do here. The two examples of historical inspiration I cited are the NET Bible and the Illustrated Catholic Bible. Both owe an obvious debt to classic design while at the same time innovating in particularly modern ways. And I think it’s fair to say that they represent two different approaches to incorporating historical influences. Let’s call the former approach structural and the latter approach nostalgic (but don’t get too attached to the second label).

The NET Bible represents the structural approach, by which I mean that it applies a medieval solution to a modern problem without any intention to appear medieval. The challenge was simple, but massive: how to incorporate the NET’s voluminous translation notes without de-emphasizing the text of Scripture. Past attempts to bring the NET with full notes to print had met with limited success. Thanks to its valuable notes, my old print edition got considerable use. It was ugly, though, a testament to the folly of trying to pack too much content onto the page. If you had asked me how to make a clean, elegant layout to tame this unruly beast, I would have been floored. And yet the solution, once you see it, appears so obvious! Taking a page from an medieval manuscript, the design sets the biblical text in a lovely center column while floating the notes in satellite columns left, right and center — a solution that would have been self-evident, I suppose, to a tonsured scribe, but seemed a stroke of genius when I first saw it. This edition remains one of my favorite of the last decade, simply because it takes a resource I valued, confronts a challenge that frustrated me, and overcomes it with such grace that I find myself struggling to recall what he problem was in the first place.

There are plenty of examples in the Museum of the Bible’s collection illustrating how solutions like this have been called upon to organize layers of complex information with clarity. I found the display of Hebrew Bibles particularly inspiring (you can see one nineteenth century example above). The thing is, the NET Bible doesn’t look like a medieval manuscript, or for that matter a nineteenth-century book. The connection is plainly visible, yet there is no hint of nostalgia in the typeface or layout. This is a purely structural solution. In every other respect, this Bible is an unapologetic product of the twenty-first century.

Which is not at all true of my second example, the Illustrated Catholic Bible, even though it is very much a product of our moment. There are (at least) two aesthetic show-stoppers here. First, of course, are the illustrations reconstructed from a sixteenth century copy of the Bible discovered by Klaus Krogh during his research. He recounted the story for us at the Bible Craftsmanship Conference, and it’s included in The Comfort Print Story. Refreshed and re-contextualized, these woodcuts feature throughout the Illustrated Catholic Bible, pulling the reader back in time to a pivotal moment in the history of printing. The impression is reinforced by the second talking point: that beautifully nostalgic font with its lavish swashes! While the crisp, clear typesetting and the frequent section headers all scream ‘modern edition,’ those swashes are redolent of buttresses and spires. Purely decorative, you might think — only you’d be wrong.

Those languid extended swashes solve a perennial typographical challenge. Columns of justified type are notorious for introducing unwanted spacing between the words, a particular problem in the interval between sentences. If you’ve ever wondered why the gaps of white space after a period seem so variable in justified type, it’s because they are. If they get out of control, those gaps can interrupt the flow of the eye as it scans, which is why some reader-conscious designs (think of Bibliotheca) prefer not to justify the text column at all. A ragged margin is preferable to all those seams and pores in amid the text. Well, the Illustrated Catholic Bible overcomes the challenge in a unique way, by extending its swashed into what would otherwise be the gaps. You can almost picture the scribe flicking his quill at the end of the line, a flash of attitude, a seemingly boastful flourish that actually conceals a bit of practical work.

In fact, these swashes are not swashes at all. Johannes Krejberg Haahr — whose name will be familiar to readers of 2K/Stories — pointed out that the proper term would be contextual ligature. They not only address the space between sentences in justified text but incorporate punctuation in the same way that ligatures incorporate sets of letters.

Unlike the NET Bible, though, the Illustrated Catholic Bible does give the impression of having leaned into the nostalgia. It straddles the line quite knowingly, juxtaposing elements insistently contemporary elements with purely nostalgic ones that turn out to be utilitarian underneath. What I find ingenious about the result is that while, on the surface, it appears to defy the modern form-follows-function mantra, it’s whimsical adornments conceal some very functional problem-solving innovations.

After my presentation at the Museum of the Bible, one member of the audience, Bryan Castañeda, wrote to make an interesting point. Bryan’s subject line, by the way, was “Bible Woodstock,” a phrase we’d been joking about during the event: If you weren’t there, you’ll forever regret it. As a Roman Catholic, Bryan felt that my way of distinguishing the clean functional aesthetic of good design from the ornamental excesses of (presumably) not-so-good design betrayed my Protestant assumptions. Given the fact that, earlier in the day, I’d found myself in the museum bookshop wondering whether I should buy the hardcover edition of Reformed Theology and Visual Culture by William A. Dyrness — despite having a perfectly good softcover already — I felt a bit exposed. Here’s the essence of his observation:

The Protestant affinity for spare aesthetics dovetails with the secular design world’s obsession with minimalism. The influence of Braun, Apple, and others have made (to use your words) rigor, austerity, and cleanliness the order of the day when it comes to defining what is “good” design. But Zen-like minimalism is merely a preference; it isn’t inherently “better” than — again, to use your words — the Victorian, the ornate, the baroque. I love reader’s editions and, to the extent your work has pushed publishers to produce them, bless you. Single column and wide margin for me, thanks. But I also love illustrated and illuminated Bibles. The Illustrated Catholic Bible that you featured in your presentation — the wood cuts, the fonts with swooshes and ligatures — is one of my favorites. A well-designed, beautiful Bible might have the austerity of a Bergman movie or the fecundity of a Fellini film.

I have no quibbles with this. To be honest, I agree wholeheartedly that it is not the style but its execution that matters, that austerity and fecundity are both virtues, that the Bergmans help us better appreciate the Fellinis, and vice versa. If my hyperbolic contrast has suggested otherwise, please believe me: I agree completely. However, I also subscribe to the archetypal aspiration expressed in the preface of Mark Argetsinger’s A Grammar of Typography: Classical Book Design in the Digital Age, the quest for the ideal (if unattainable) form: “What is wanted in the text of a book, I maintain, is a formula worked out by the masters of the 16th century, which may be described in its positive aspects as simple, pure, restrained, perhaps austere, but as such, well-proportioned, harmonious, balanced, symmetrical, and elegant.” Argetsinger notes that “classicism lends to the text … logic and legibility,” and it strikes me that any design which achieves these can be forgiven pretty much anything else. (And I know Bryan will agree, because he enthusiastically endorses Argetsinger’s magnificent book.)

Here’s another question. Doesn’t a nuanced view of the publishing history make it difficult to draw such a hard line between Protestant and Roman Catholic aesthetics? One of the real delights of the conference for me was getting to spend time with Dr. David Price (above) — whose dinner conversation, I should note, is just as illuminating has his lecture on Reformation Bibles, based on his recent book In the Beginning Was the Image: Art and the Reformation Bible. Consider the Lutheran editions he highlighted in his talk, books which set the standard for printed Bibles for generations to come. They are not exactly wanting when it comes to ornamentation. Just the opposite, in fact. If you examine the early German editions in the Museum’s collection, there are some lovely pieces. And that fascinating anecdote about Roman Catholic publishers using woodcut tiaras cut from satirical Lutheran blocks in their own printed books demonstrates the kind of cross-pollination that was possible even between belligerent parties. In fact, there’s a part of me that wonders how different, at least in terms of design, a hypothetical Illustrated Lutheran Bible would be from the Catholic edition we have here — again, considered in the broadest sense.

I am not, in fact, a thoroughgoing minimalist, even though I admire the sentiment. For example, while in Washington, DC, Johannes and I visited the various monuments together, noting how ubiquitous the Trajan typeface is, as Klaus pointed out in his talk on the development of letterforms. We also examined a lot of stone columns in light of the story I shared from the beginning of Ayn Rand’s doorstopper The Fountainhead, in which architect Howard Roark rants against the dishonesty of fluted columns. At the Lincoln Memorial, I ran my hands over the dishonest columns and pronounced them good. I sympathize with Roark’s iconoclasm and believe that most artistic projects benefit from such sweeping over-reactions if only to motivate their creators in what is typically a hard and thankless task. But temperamentally, I prefer beauty for its own sake over its omission in the service of some scruple.

I have no objection to purely decorative design, and nostalgic editions seem like the perfect place to indulge such fancies. Yet I find the “artless art” Klaus practices — the achievement of practical ends through decorative means — so breathtaking, so impressive, that I can’t help hoping that future designers will take the example to heart. If you study the description of how the Illustrated Catholic Bible developed in The Comfort Print Story, you’ll discover a two-fisted approach to conceptualizing an edition. On the one hand, Klaus soaks up inspiration, steeping himself in past editions, typography, artwork, opening his sensibility up to the way that everything around him — architecture, artwork, history — can inform the design. On the other, he ruminates over the technical hurdles, the fixed obstacles, the aspects of a project like this that resist being designed … until a path forward clears. He doesn’t neglect the design challenges to serve up a stroke of nostalgia. Instead he turns that stroke (that swash, if you will) into the solution.

If you cannot draw inspiration from that example, then you need to find a new imagination to draw with.