The Centaur Types
By Bruce Rogers and Misha Beletsky
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About this ebook
In 1948, the world-renowned book designer Bruce Rogers wrote a brief text that documented and illustrated his creation of the Centaur typeface several decades earlier: The Centaur Types. The book was privately printed by Rogers himself under the name of his design studio, October House. This limited edition of the book was transferred to the Purdue University Libraries at the time of his death along with his other papers and books. Over the years remaining stock of the original private printing has found its home in the Special Collections of the Libraries, and although known as something of a collector's item by those who are aware of the few copies in circulation, it is here available to the general market for the first time in both paperback and digital versions.
The Centaur Types is a fascinating book for several reasons: in the designer's own words, we learn of the evolution of the typeface and of his interest in the art and craft of creating type; it demonstrates different and comparable typefaces, and gives examples of Centaur from six to seventy-two point; and it stands as a fitting example of fine bookmaking from one of the master book designers of the twentieth century.
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The Centaur Types - Bruce Rogers
INTRODUCTION
Bruce Rogers is arguably the greatest book designer America ever produced. For much of the twentieth century he was the best-known book designer in the world, although he is rarely mentioned today. While Rogers devoted almost all of his energies to book design, there is at least one other indelible contribution he made to the graphic arts: his timeless Centaur roman typeface design, the story of which The Centaur Types relates.
Hailing from Linwood, Indiana, Bruce Rogers graduated from Purdue University in 1890. He worked as a newspaper illustrator and railroad clerk before transferring into design at J. M. Bowles’s Modern Art magazine. He moved with the magazine to Boston in 1895. After the magazine failed, he went to work for Houghton Mifflin & Company, taking the position previously held by D. B. Updike, who had left in 1893 to found the Merrymount Press. At Houghton Mifflin’s captive printing works, the Riverside Press, Rogers would attempt his first typeface design based on Jenson’s seminal roman of 1470, Montaigne. In 1912 Rogers left Houghton Mifflin, becoming a wandering freelance book designer for the rest of his life. It was around that time that Rogers began work on his Centaur typeface, which he saw as an improvement on his earlier attempt at a revival of Jenson’s type. And indeed it was.
Three books are invariably cited as Rogers’s finest work: Fra Luca de Pacioli (The Grolier Club, 1933); the Oxford Lectern Bible (1935), hailed as the greatest book of the 20th century
by Joseph Blumenthal; and Homer’s Odyssey (1932), translated by T. E. Shaw (Lawrence of Arabia). All were set in Centaur: two in the Monotype version, with the Bible in a specially redesigned version of the 22-point size. Interestingly, all three were printed under Rogers’s direct supervision in England, where he loved to go, not in his native United States.