Not Big Caslon, but rather Very Big Caslon: those of you strolling through midtown Manhattan may want to stop and visit the largest font of type I’ve ever seen — maybe the largest in the world — located in the lobby of the Time Warner building at 1271 Avenue of the Americas.
The 13 x 6 1/2 foot sculpture, a showing of William Caslon’s eponymous 471, was originally commissioned by Time magazine. The “author,” if the piece can be said to have one other than Caslon himself, was Hank Brennan, former art director of Fortune magazine (the architect of the so-called Fortune look [also here], which came to dominate American magazine design in the 1940s and ’50s, and a very interesting character and important figure in American design who deserves an article devoted solely to him). Brennan explained at the time that “the sculpture is symbolic of the basic working tool of Time Inc. — the letters of the alphabet. And there is nothing more beautiful than a tool.”
The sculpture was based on an example of Caslon 471 used in the home workshop of Time employee Amos Bethke, and was fabricated by the General Bronze Corporation. No word on whether it is actually moveable, but from close inspection the individual characters do all seem to be separate pieces, although their depth is a bit more than type high.
Many thanks to Sandra Manley with the Rockefeller Group and Nancy Soohoo Facci & Renee Supriano at Time Warner Book group for their generous assistance!
Technically, it’s only a partial font. I know someone’s gonna get all nitpicky about that.
Out of curiosity I took the photo and scaled it to where the height of the piece was 6 1/2 feet tall and tried to determine the point size by overlaying Caslon 3 (the closest I have). It comes out to about 400 to 410 point by what I can tell, do you think there’s any significance to the point size? Maybe my measurements are off from the distortion of the photo and it’s actually 471 pt?
JLT, I agree it’s absolutely gorgeous. Truly so.
In staring at the photo, I wonder what happened to the thickness of the ascender and descender in the N. They look positively anemic compared to the (true) left facing side of the M. Is it a glare issue or a byproduct of �ber enlargement (or my take)?
Truly very lovely.
And not to split hairs, but I think it’s a complete font, as that is a narrow definition by nature. What it is not is a complete typeface.
Cool, Joshua.
The question of what makes a font “complete” is interesting. For one thing, the criteria are different for metal and digital. In the case of digital you could say a font has a certain “level” of completeness depending on what groups of characters are supported: caps only, alphabetics, alphanumerics, Latin-1, CE, etc. While in the case of metal you could say it’s much more of an issue of what sorts the given setting requires; in this way you could even say for example that a font with one “e” and one “z” is in fact less complete than a font with two “e”s and no “z” (because of linguistic frequency requirements).
Judas: I think the thinness of the “N”‘s stems compared to the “M”‘s might be due to parallax.
hhp
I was told in school that a complete font of type (i.e. of metal foundry type) was a complete case ďż˝ a “useable amount” as it were, and more than just a single alphabet showing.
I did have to distort the photo quite a bit – the parallax was all wrong on the original, so it’s very possible that it is actually 471 point – the folks who took the photo for me did not have a tripod, so they couldn’t get up right in front of the piece.
Amos Bethke was my grandfather. I always loved visiting his home and being in his workshop there. After he passed away his headstone was engraved in this font. I rember my dad saying it was special, something about the symmetry of the O. I am so pleased to see a mention of him here. I didn’t know about this art work until now. I will have to see it the next time I am in New York.
Thank you for your comment, Sarah. I’ve fixed the link to JLT’s photo so it should be visible now.