#gothic script

Typography Tuesday

This week, a little bit of Gothic with The Gothic Script of the Middle Ages by H. C. Schulz, printed in San Francisco by the Grabhorn Press in an edition of 71 copies for the publisher and first bibliographer of the Grabhorn Press David Magee in 1939. The type used is Fred Goudy's Deepdene Text, a blackletter typeface designed in the early 1930s to complement his humanist Deepdene typeface designed earlier. The two typefaces are not otherwise related in style. The book is printed in red, black, and blue, with a lovely gold-leaf initial T in the opening text.

This volume is a "leaf book": a book with content centered on the content of another book, or type of book, with a sample leaf from that other book included in the volume. In this case, a leaf from a late 14th-century manuscript Collectar is included in the publication. We don't know who H. C. Schulz is, but judging from the several other leaf books he produced with the Grabhorn Press, he must have been a collector and authority on manuscript books. Unfortunately, he also seems to have been a breaker of books, or at best a collector of broken books, which in turn encourages the breaking of books.

Schulz describes the leaf included here as made "probably in Northern France" and that "The writing is a very bold Gothic script in the best liturgical tradition, and a contrast to its heaviness is given by the fine pen ornamentation of the initials." Our copy of The Gothic Script of the Middle Ages is part of a gift from the estate of our dear friend Dennis Bayuzick.  

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick. 

A minim is "a short, vertical stroke used in handwriting" and the 'minim problem' refers to the difficulty of differentiating between the letters i, u, o, v, m, n (especially in Gothic script). Here's an example:

This problem led to some spelling developments to be able to differentiate between the letters:

Minims often have a connecting stroke which makes it clear that they form an m, n, etc.; however, in Gothic scripts, also known as textualis especially in late examples, minims may connect to each other with only a hair line stroke making it difficult for modern readers to tell what letter is meant. A 13th-century example of this is: mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt ("the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the defences of the wine be diminished"). In Gothic script this would look almost like a series of single strokes (this problem eventually led to a dotted ⟨i⟩ and separate letters ⟨j⟩ and ⟨v⟩).

Middle English scribes adopted a practice of replacing ⟨u⟩ before ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩, or ⟨v⟩ with ⟨o⟩ in order to break up the sequence of minims. The resulting spellings have persisted into modern times in words such as come, honey, and love, where an o stands for a short ŭ.

Source: Wikipedia