Lund Humphries Types

The reason I set up Ace Jet 170 was because I have stuff stashed all over the house. Tucked at the bottom of a wardrobe, gathering dust on top, getting damp in the garage or (mostly) relatively unreachable in the loft. Ace Jet gives me a place to put it all, one place.

Of course, what's nice about having these little stashes all over the place is that every now and then I stumble across something forgotten. Like these two little booklets from Lund Humphries. The first being their type specimen booklet (the photos of that bit of type on the cover came out so well I felt the need to include all three).

There's no date in the booklets but I'd guess they'd be from the late 50s. Hot Metal days of course so fonts/sizes would be limited. A number of matrices give an overview of what was available.

The second booklet is their composition rules, compiled by the very great Herbert Spencer (which reminds me that I have Penrose Annuals to blog) who was responsible for these and this essential book for anyone interested in typography, amongst other things.

Read more about him here.

The booklet deserves close examination and, thankfully, backs up this.

Comments

[davidthedesigner]

"The colon and the dash should ( italics) be used in con-
junction {:–}."

Well, blow me, that's another rule I'm always breaking.

[Richard]

Put your specs on David, is says "never" (italics) be used.

So that means you either misread the photo or miswrote your comment. Or I've got it all wrong.

Question is, do you used the colon and the dash together?

[davidthedesigner]

Sorry - that was me trying to be a clever bugger. I was trying to emphasise that 'never' was set in italics, so I thought I'd do so by putting fake html coding either side of the word:-

I guess Typepad doesn't like me doing that, though.

Does that answer your question?

[Richard]

So let me get this straight David: not only do you admit to using the hyphen where an en-rule should go, you also confess to using the colon along side the dash. A marriage made by the devil himself.

You'll be telling me next that you're left-handed.

Wait a minute...

[davidthedesigner]

Ah, but what I didn't tell you was that I only use the colon-dash conjunction when I'm blogging. I'd never dream of doing it in print, obviously.

[Richard]

Obviously.

[Ian Morris]

I have been looking into this and came across your blog (nice by the way). Based on what i've seen I'd say that colon and dash should be avoided at all costs.

Strange how people do it though really isn't it. Who's been teaching this? I don't think I was listen at school when this came up so am therefore finding out now at the age of 31 ;-)

[James Penny]

Hello fello orthographers/typographers,

More than two years after the most recent post i find myself on this blog page, where the permittance of a colon followed by an en/em-dash / hyphen is discussed and i find myself writing on the comments page.

While reading the (already 4 years out of date) reviewers guide to Adobe FrameMaker 8 i see on page 5/40 the same text translated into four languages (English, Greek, Russian, Hindi) and for each script at the end of each heading a colon [:] is used... except in Greek, where they use a colon and an en-dash [:-].

I found this so odd i wanted to google whether it was still, or indeed ever was, correct punctuation to use the two together, and in what contexts, and to imply what, and to separate itself (the colon and dash together i now refer to as "it") from its constituent parts.

So far, this is all i have discovered.

I'm sure i remember seeing [:-] used when i was a child, but alas, i don't see it anymore. And i am 30.

An interesting topic...