Periods and commas of letter-spaced capitals should not be set off from the last letter of the word, regardless of the amount of spacing used elsewhere in the line.
Colons and semicolons have traditionally been set apart from the word they follow, whether in capitals or lower case. In old books they are frequently centered in the space between the words where they occur. Exclamation and interrogation points should if possible be set off with thin spaces because they often form disagreeable and confusing combinations with the last letter of the word, such as ff!, ll!, f?, etc.
[36] Of the more than half-thousand books that Mr. Rogers has designed, only four come to mind as having the text matter printed in anything other than black; and these four were all slight volumes, more or less in the gift-book classification.
[37] "When we look at his books we think of Baskerville; while to look at the work of Jenson is to think but of its beauty, and almost to forget that it was made with hands!" UPDIKE, _Printing Types_, II, p. 116.
ADVENTURER WITH TYPE ORNAMENT [Illustration: B.R.]
Revised and amended from P.M., Vol. II, No. 5, New York, January 1936.
To anyone who has set or handled type, the achievements of Bruce Rogers in combining decorative type units to form a design are extraordinary. This may seem undiluted enthusiasm; actually and sincerely it is but simple fact.
How? Why? Only a detailed examination of a particular B.R. design with type ornaments will reveal. An examination, that is, accompanied by simultaneous scanning of a proof of the individual elements comprising the design. When one sees the units alone--some of them so seemingly useless that one wonders that anything, even second-rate stuff, could possibly be done with such drab material--then one appreciates the typographic magic B.R. has accomplished.
_How_ he sees anything in some of the units he uses so dexterously, I don't know. When and how he first became interested in doing designs with type ornaments is worth considering.
His experiments date back to Riverside Press days, though in that period no attempts were made to use type ornament except by conventional combinations into borders or head-pieces. But even at that time he had several seventeenth-century flowers recut for the decoration of a collection of early American documents, titled _Sailors Narratives of Voyages Along the New England Coast, 1524-1624_, edited by George Parker Winship.