The Dolphin, Number 2, 1935

[Fred G. Unn]

I just picked up a pretty great journal from 1935:


There's a cool chapter on "The Printing of Music" covering from 1473-1934. The book itself is quite beautiful, including a color chapter on the art of W.A. Dwiggins, designer of Electra and other well known typefaces.

Here's the table of contents:



You can view the whole thing online here, but it would be a cool acquisition for other notation or type geeks like me:
https://digitalcollections.library.cmu. ... 12_lib,a=t

[John Ruggero]

It looks very interesting, "Fred", but there is only one page of The Dolphin available at the URL you gave.

[Fred G. Unn]

Sorry, there's no way to link directly to the notation stuff in that format, as far as I can tell. If you click the link, click #2, then click the "multi-page" button all the way on the right side, the whole thing will open up. Skip ahead to page 174 (171 in the journal) for the notation article. Some of the info I knew, but some was interesting to me anyway.











The typography stuff was pretty interesting too!

[benwiggy]

I used to have a book that was a little history of '400 years of music printing', produced by the British Library, (sadly, I can't find it on my shelves...), which covered all this stuff in sufficient detail.

But this is lovely. And as with notation software, it's true that InDesign doesn't make you an expert typesetter.

[John Ruggero]

That did the trick. What a wealth of information!

[Fred G. Unn]

sadly, I can't find it on my shelves...

I have that one too! It's pretty small, it's probably just hiding ...

[benwiggy]

I wonder: has anyone made a font of that old Breitkopf "modern type"?

As for The Dolphin: I ticked the No.2 box with a page image, then clicked the Download 'icon" in the top right. Then under Downloads in the sidebar, I could download the file. (There's a bit of click-through, but that should help.)

[Fred G. Unn]

Good catch on the download! It's much easier to reference a PDF than get out my physical copy.

[benwiggy]

And Vol 1 has an article by Frederic Goudy!

[John Ruggero]

I downloaded all 1726 pages of it. It's encyclopdedic. There is little information about it online, but WWII may have stopped it.