Letters Get Togethers

Specimen sheet By William Caslon  1732

My original topic was going to be on William Caslon because his cut type was the first in English and was used in the Declaration of Independence. But, as I began my research I noticed something curious about his fonts… ligatures. Ligatures are two or more letters connected together in succession and, in our day and age, are nearly only seen in trademarks, logos, or as a design aesthetic, and not as a part of the written language or built into the font itself. So be it, my research began to take a tangent into  ligatures came from.

The example to the right is a specimen sheet of William Caslon's letters and if you click on it you can see it in a large view. When you look through the sheet, you can see a lot of the various ligatures. For instance, in the second column, the third section down, you can see that Caslon cut ligatures for the letter combinations of ct, ft, ff, fq, fu, and ae. 

The John Baskerville specimen sheet also shows examples of ligatures such as the ae, the ft, and fl.

14th-century manuscript: Watriquet de Couvin's Fabliaux divers... (Paris, ca. 1330), a book of secular medieval French poetry.

Our Meggs book has countless examples of ligatures through out the images of typography yet also in illuminated manuscripts. It could look as if early typographers were merely mimicking the handy work of scribes. Scribes often ran the letters close together as a space saving device. Typographers, similarly created ligatures as a space saving device. "With the invention of Metal Movable Type in the 15th century, ligatures flourished and were a great time saver when setting type. For example, instead of having to set an “f” and an “i”, a single ligature block could be used instead. That may not seem like a great time saver, but when you’re setting an entire book 0f 40,000 words in movable type, then it could certainly make a difference" (I Love Typography).

So what happened to ligatures. According to I Love Typography, the inventions of typewriters and desktop publishing did away with them in the search of simplification. However they still do exist and see them more than we acknowledge.

Sources:

ilovetypography.com Decline and Fall of the Ligature

Bowdoin.edu Perkinson Shines Light on 15th-century Illuminated Manuscripts