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Comment by drewblaisdell | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that text is very difficult to read. I'm having a difficult time figuring out why the type used is so illegible.

There are two factors here: 1. illegible to whom? 2. what do you expect a book to look like?

The Textura letter forms would have been more familiar to readers at the time, and were used widely in German until surprisingly recently. Even today we use them in English-speaking countries for short pieces of text that need to look authoritative. See the header of the manuscript of the US Constitution or the masthead of most old newspapers.

More importantly, these shapes looked similar to the letterforms from expensively hand-written bibles of the time. Different scripts take different amounts of time to write. A script like this written by hand takes an enormous amount of time because every stroke doubles back on itself. So only quite expensive books would be hand-written in this way. Of course, when you're printing, it makes little difference, so might as well print with the most-expensive-looking letterforms.

Here are some alternate scripts used in English writing around the same time: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic453618.files/Cent...

(Source: wife studied paleography at Oxford, we have lots of fun books about this. There are far, far worse hands to decipher than textura, some scribes were truly terrible. You can also date manuscripts based on small characteristics of the hand-writing. Although, it can be a bit inexact. My wife once corrected a museum placard dating a text based on the writing. The docent argued with her about the characteristics of the script before she pointed out that the text mentioned a Saint born a century after the supposed date.)

Right on. Worth mentioning that the illuminated manuscripts of the time were the gold standard, and even though the Gutenberg bibles were not illuminated in the print shop, that's most likely why they had plenty of room in the margins.

Edit: Since you seem to have a convenient source there, could you link to some of the better medieval manuscript repositories online? Bookmarks got lost over the years.

2. what do you expect a book to look like?

obviously lucida console

He was imitating (some, mostly liturgical) handwritten books at the time. One of the goals during the creation of the books was to show that he could approach the quality of expensive handwritten books at the time at a fraction of the price. It’s not like just printing something is really complex technology (I, too, carved potato stamps in kindergarden), but approaching the quality of the gold standard at the time while still keeping the price lower was the hard problem.

While the typeface has some issues (m, n, u, i all look confusingly similar when next to each other, for example) I think the issue may just be that you are not used to reading it. This particular typeface is about 500 years out of fashion so you were never really confronted with it.

I know there are many many subtleties in "X is easier to read than Y" (capitals vs lowercase, ligatures vs no ligatures, black on white vs yellow on black, etc) claims, but surely, blackletter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter) must be harder to read than modern writing. I can't find a paper on that, though. It probably would be hard to find subjects with equal experience reading that and modern writing.

I can't confirm that. I grew up learning blackletter first (since my mother didn't want me to get bored in school too quickly) and after a few minutes of getting used to it again, it's not at all harder to read to me than modern writing.

Some letters, like the ſ, aren't that easy to get used to, but when you do get used to them they actually help you (or, well, help me) read faster. That is, I think, because letters with an ascender are easily identified, and ſ (a different form for s) is actually very common in those texts.

The quickest answer is that we've learned a lot about legible type in the intervening half millennium. Conversely, this typograhic style was probably considered pretty readable by the people who were used to reading it.

A really interesting book on the characteristics of written and printed letterforms is "The stroke" [0].

One really interesting thing is the way that writing and reading have changed more than one might expect. A few anecdotes:

- Until some time in the middle ages, scribes did not consistently use spaces to designate word breaks. This was apparently an innovation of Irish monks. But it had important implications. Sounding out a string of letters is quite difficult. Our modern reading speed depends on the characteristic shapes of words, which only emerged once spaces were used consistently.

- Until relatively late, reading was a laborious process. And because the only things important enough to be written were worth reading slowly, no one much minded. One charge laid against the Jesuits was that they had developed a sinister method of reading silently rather than out loud(!) which allowed them to read much more quickly.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Stroke-Writing-Gerrit-Noordzij/dp/...

Augustine found it worth remarking upon that Ambrose read silently. Many medieval letters and books started with something like "don't read this in the presence of others, for it is secret". And there's a reason why we call little working nooks carols and why we still talk about chewing over new ideas. It's hard to imagine a time when reading and (basic, not necessarily creative) writing were separate skills, and that having the one did not necessarily imply having the other. We've changed a bit since printing happened.

> It's hard to imagine a time when reading and (basic, not necessarily creative) writing were separate skills, and that having the one did not necessarily imply having the other. We've changed a bit since printing happened.

I'm guessing you don't have kids - it was quite an eye-opener for me when my eldest learnt to write before learning to read: I'd always assumed writing was harder than reading, and that both were intimately linked... They're definitely separate skills.

Been there, done that, as folks say (and it was quite a while back — the kids have kids). That period in a child's life, though, is a short one, and most folks don't remember their own experience of the phenomenon (or much of anything else from that age, either) very well. (I'd bet that most of the people who use this site read relatively fluently before school age. Heck, most of us are so literate that we often mistake these here squiggles for "real" language when it is, at best, a rough guide for reconstructing what is a much more nuanced (and ephemeral) means of communicating.) "hard to imagine" and "hard to see if you're paying attention" are not interchangeable statements.

Conversely, some people may be surprised at how quickly now-familiar type appeared. Within twenty years of the Gutenberg Bible, Nicolas Jenson had completed his miniscules, based on contemporary Italian humanist script, and designed to complement classical Roman inscriptional capitals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jenson_1475_venice_laerti...

In fact blackletter was generally considered more difficult to read than other scripts (that's one of the reasons Italic became so popular, IIRC). But it's also incredibly compact, which is a big deal when paper (or parchment, or whatever) is as difficult to acquire as it was at the time.

If this "historical fact" was so well-known, how come Germany and Scandinavia used Fraktur well into the 1930s as the most common typefaces?

In reality, the respective difficulties were far harder to prove than one might think. First more rigorous scientific testing using tachistoscopes in the early 1900s/1910s provided more conclusive evidence beyond the anecdotal that Antiqua typefaces were indeed faster to parse than Fraktur. Until then, many people who were more commonly accustomed to reading blackletter simply thought it easier to read. Much of this has to do with accustomisation. If you are used to reading Antiqua, you will be faster, if you are used to reading Fraktur & Sütterlin but only encounter Antiqua every now and then, you will probably be quicker in reading the former.

National pride, I think. By the 19th century it was generally acknowledged that Antiqua typefaces were more legible, but they were perceived as insufficiently German or whatever.

In any case, Fraktur probably would be a lot easier to read than old-school blackletter hands— look at the sheer number of strange ligatures and abbreviations in the Gutenburg bible!

This is entirely based off of memory so I could very well be wrong. The fact that blackletter originally evolved as a way of condensing text, though, is pretty much indisputable.

It seems that was what people at the time were used to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter#Origins

Does anybody know what the purpose of the red marks in some of those letters is?

When books were hand-written, anything that took longer to do was more expensive: extra colors, pictures, or scripts that required longer to write. This printed book is attempting to incorporate elements from a very fancy handwritten version. So there is a luxury association to these sorts of things.

It looks here like it's setting off the first letter of each verse, rather than having the verses numbered. Because sentences start and end at different places in different languages, finding a specific verse requires the book marking where one ends and a new one begins.

The red marks are used to decorate (or maybe indicate) capital letters.

The first movies of theatrical productions plopped a camera in what was presumably the best seat in the house and let 'er rip. New media start by imitating their predecessors.

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