Re: Single Spacing, Double Spacing, and Doing It Ones Own Way [VERY LONG]

[Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>]

I think Bruce and Geoff have done a great job of elucidating most of the 
issues that have arisen in this thread, and I was proud of myself for 
biting my tongue (fingers, perhaps?) all day and staying out of the 
fray. But now I'd like to shed at least a little light, if possible, 
into some obscure corners that others have missed.

First, the history of the double space.

Lucy Connor, in the To Space or not to Space thread last week, cited an 
author who, like many others, and like some folks today, claims that the 
double space somehow improves the readability of monospace fonts. As I 
wrote to Lucy off-list:

A single space after a period in monospaced fonts looks just fine to our 
modern eyes, so his explanation (used by many other authors as well) is 
specious.

Here is a more accurate reason, based on my analysis of my collection of 
typographic specimens and my knowledge of the history of typography. The 
typewriter was commercialized toward the end of the 19th century. The 
purpose of the typewriter was to offer businesses a low-cost way to 
produce documents that superficially resemble typeset documents. That 
is, it was marketed as a "_type_ writer," not as an "automatic 
secretary," for example.

In order to foster the rapid adoption of the technology, secretarial 
schools quickly instituted courses. I don't know whether these courses 
were underwritten by typewriter manufacturers, but I imagine that a lot 
of the course material was initially provided by them. The 
manufacturers, being focused on the device's ability to emulate the 
typeset page, promoted a typing style that accomplished that as well as 
they could.

Meanwhile, typsetting, which began as a closely guarded art and 
initially emulated the beautiful medieval monastic manuscripts in order 
to appeal to its market, had devolved to its lowest point in history by 
the mid-nineteenth century. Then, as now, compositors charged by the 
thousand ems. In order to provide the lowest possible bid on a 
commercial job, sharp operators needed to keep their costs down, and one 
way to do that was to reduce the labor of setting those thousand ems. 
The solution was to space out the text as much as possible (faster for 
the hand pegger, more ems per hour, lower cost per thousand ems). If you 
look at 19th-century commercial work (not literary or scholarly work, 
much of which maintained _some_ esthetic standards), you can find many 
examples where there is no hyphenation (don't need to employ 
English-speaking peggers) and the lines are spaced out with large word 
spaces and with spaces after a period that vary from an em to three or 
four ems in extreme examples.

This sorry state of affairs led to severe criticism from artists and 
writers in the Arts and Crafts movement--notably William Morris--and 
that was the beginning of the modern typographic esthetic, which 
dictates a _uniform color_ of the typeset page as a standard of quality 
(and this standard, of course, dictates a uniform word space after the 
period, which, happily, is also the easiest way to set type with the 
then-new Linotype). But that movement didn't really hit its stride until 
the first decades of the twentieth century, and the older, artless, 
practices of commercial typesetting continued at least until the 1950s, 
especially in smaller shops with older employees.

So the secretarial schools worked to emulate the then-current typeset 
page, with its huge pigeonholes [not rivers, which are formed by 
pigeonholes that are contiguous to each other as you scan down a 
paragraph] between sentences. And thus was born the two-space rule.

Now you know, if you've ever met a secretarial school graduate, that 
these institutions are about as hidebound and rigid as they come. Once 
they had established their typing rules, those rules remained in place 
until, as far as I know, today. High school typing teachers all came out 
of secretarial schools, and here we are. Welcome to the twenty-first 
century.

As for whether one should waste one's precious time worrying about such 
things, no, of course not. But if you already have internalized an 
understanding of the craft of typesetting, it takes no longer to do it 
well than to do it poorly (as Bruce said). And if you have not already 
internalized that understanding and don't want to be bothered, then 
perhaps the world would be a slightly more pleasant place if you would 
organize your life so that someone else took on that part of the job for 
you. In other words, if you hate maintaining the pretense that you know 
how to put together a page, stop pretending and delegate it to someone 
else. That would be much more appropriate than belittling people who 
know something you don't know.

Harrumph!

Dick

Bruce Byfield wrote: