The Horror of France

Just a quick update with some good passages I've come across.

The first, is from Bookbinding and Book Production, Volume 50, page 76, from 1949.  (And just to be completely clear here, since there is great confusion over both our printing history, and the term “French Spacing”, the change discussed here is the move from wide sentence spacing to narrow sentence spacing.)

French Spacing? Horrors!

Reports that “French Spacing” might become more widely accepted on account of savings in money and time has caused at least one designer to remark “Preposterous.” Another threatened “I'll shoot any compositor who does,” and another claimed that someone was just trying to be different—“a brand of lunacy.”  Only one voice spoke in favor of such a trend.

 “French Spacing” or word spacing between sentences is one of the recent typographical innovations at the Waverly Press, Baltimore, Md.   With the advent of shoulder-spaced type, the change became an economic issue as well as a typographic one. Only because accountants speak louder than artists, the change was made.  The advantage is that every time the end of a sentence is reached, one character is cast instead of two.  The actual saving in caster strokes while not heavy percentage-wise is very high numerically with the millions of caster strokes made each week.

I tend to say that the transition period from wide to narrow sentence spacing is from about 1930 to 1950, but it's clear that there were some holdouts even at the end there, and that they felt as strongly about this as modern one-spacers.

I disagree with their simplistic analysis of the cost.  Simply the cost of typing the key was not a major issue.  (For that matter, neither was savings in paper, although in both cases, that was an era of particularly overzealous bean-counting.)  As mentioned in other articles here, it was a constellation of factors: it saved in error corrections (once the habit was relearned); it reduced the rivers that were a particular problem of the Linotype; it prevented machine downtime when typists were used on teletypesetting systems; etc.

They are one of the very few sources I have found, ever (before like the 1970s) that use the term “French Spacing”, which as I have said elsewhere has undergone a reversal of meaning (and an incomplete one, meaning that modern sources contradict each other).  French spacing originally was word spacing between sentences, versus the wide spacing we used.  Some modern sources completely reverse this.

I have a theory that we'd never even know about “French Spacing” if it wasn't for the \frenchspacing operator in Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting language.  But we do know about it, and as I've said in my other article, the change was probably inevitable.  But it seems to have started (in spirit at least) sooner than I thought.

In 1960, an article was found in The Inland Printer and American Lithographer (or some vaguely similar name to that which seemed to change repeatedly over the years), volume 145, from 1960, as well as Typo Graphic (some volume or another), also from 1960.  It was found in a “Question & Answer” section.

Q. What is French spacing?
A. There is no reference to this term in any textbook on printing or in any glossary. In searching for a precise answer I therefore turned to a number of the leading typographers in New York. To my surprise, a good many of them had never heard the phrase. However, I was finally able to come up with the following:
    French spacing is tight spacing, with equal word spacing throughout a line, i.e., no extra space after a period, colon, etc. The purpose is not only to create a tighter looking, evenly colored page, but, more important, to avoid rivers. In some ad shops, French spacing is understood to mean optically equal word spacing. As to the “French” part of the term, this style has nothing to do with France as verified by several French cultural societies and printers. The word was evidently used because anything “French” was considered to be du haut style.

This confirms what I suspected, that this was a rarely used term.  But also, at the end there, they deny that French Spacing had anything to do with French practices, instead assuming that word spacing was called French as a sort of compliment.  Step one in the rewriting of the history.  Step two of course, was to recognize that nothing truly American could ever be called French, and we have a full reversal.

I also assume the claim that they actually contacted French printers was either a lie, or they contacted someone who was clueless.  As far as I'm aware, France never used wide spacing, although I admit I haven't researched the subject as thoroughly.

The first quote also opens up another avenue of exploration: I have to go and figure out what the “shoulder-spaced type” in that first quote means.  Some hints I've seen point to yet more technological issues that both benefitted and hampered the printing process.