When I told my father I wished to join publishing, he gave me an old Pelican edition of SH Steinberg’s Five Hundred Years of Printing and Frederic W Goudy’s Elements of Lettering. Both belonged to his father, Tarapada Chowdhury.
A Vedic scholar and an authority on the Atharvaveda, my grandfather was head of the Sanskrit department at Patna University in the 1950s. Apart from his academic duties for much of the 1940s-1950s till his death in 1959, he also saw the Journal of Patna University to the press.
Over the years, he wrote many scholarly essays for the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society and its later avatar Journal of the Bihar Research Society, on the Vedas, linguistic aberrations in Kalidasa and the taxonomy of medicinal plants in early Indian and medieval texts. He would later print some of the longer essays as offprints at his own cost. The venerable Indological publisher Motilal Banarsidass would distribute them through their Patna branch.
The essays were incomprehensible to someone like me who managed to get pass marks in Sanskrit in matriculation. But later in my 30s-early 40s, after spending a significant amount of time editing scholarly books for Manohar, I could appreciate the meticulous work which went into printing and proofing those essays. The tight lines, the exactness of the accents and diacritics, the fine hair space, the right ‘ibid.’s and ‘idem’s and the bibliography where scholars make most of their mistakes.
The work was pucca. While I could not appreciate the scholarship, given my inadequate Sanskrit, I could appreciate his publishing chops. This was a man who had a profound knowledge of the art of linotype and letterpress printing.The Elements of Lettering came in handy when my first novel – Patna Roughcut – was published in 2005 by Picador. My editor and I tried all favourite fonts – Baskerville, Bembo and Garamond. And yet we felt the typeset pages in those fonts were cramped and made the narrative move too fast. We wanted a font that would make the text breathe, make the reader pause and take in her time, slow down her eye, and, in turn, make us penetrate her memory. In short, we needed a font that could gaslight her for life.Sabon, designed by Jan Tschichold in 1964, an old-type serif font, came the closest to achieving what we imagined. We almost finalised it when I remembered Elements of Lettering. The difference between Sabon and Goudy Old Style, both serif fonts, is, to the naked eye, ‘unnis-bees’. But when we printed Patna Roughcut in Goudy Old Style, the effect, to our eyes, was magical. It slowed time all around.
Readers, along with the characters, had more fursat now. They started looking at the minor details without worrying about the narrative running away from them. I could now tap into their memory. My editor approved. Five years later, we also used Goudy Old Style for my next book.
This kind of all-consuming madness for typesetting and the art of bookmaking is celebrated in Sebastian’s book. I come across this passage about Valenti Angelo, printer extraordinaire: ‘He bought four (fonts) with him: De Roos, Goudy Tory, Perpetua and Koch Jessenscrift. (The Goudy face, he says, was cut specially for him by Frederic Goudy, who personally handed it to him just before the 1950 fire that destroyed Goudy’s printing and foundry shop.).’
The passage takes me right back to my grandfather, his meticulous eye, and my time as a young writer working on his first novel.