Type Specimens

Historically, makers and distributors of what we now call “fonts” produced and circulated typographic specimens to advertise typefaces to users. Both visual format and professional practice, the type specimen occasionally served as a status symbol. More commonly, specimens were produced as ephemeral documents. Thus, they often fell prey to physical damage, loss, and/or cultural devaluing, which in turn led to their relative scarcity in archives. Surviving specimen books outnumber broadsides, having a sturdier physical nature and a higher cultural value. Still, many have pages missing, as printers often cut samples directly from specimens when ordering type. For these reasons and others, it’s difficult to undertake archival research to support a historical—and, as far as possible, globally contextual—overview of type specimens. Yet these documents offer insights about the role typography has played in global design conversations. What does the type specimen tell us about its social, commercial, and political contexts—at its time of production, over its lifespan, and in the present moment? What do type specimens tell us about the cultural work performed by typography and typographers? How do specimens demonstrate both the material histories and complex intercultural meanings of typography? Type Specimens (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) explores these questions, treating both words and images as texts equally deserving of our attention.

Until his retirement from teaching in 2018, Roy R. Behrens was Professor of Art and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he had taught graphic design and design history at various art schools and universities for more than 45 years. 

He has published seven books, and literally hundreds of articles in journals, books, and magazines, and has appeared in broadcast interviews on NOVA, National Public Radio, Australian Public Radio, and BBC, as well as in documentary films. He has been a nominee for the Smithsonian Institution's National Design Awards, has received the Iowa Board of Regents Faculty Excellence Award, and has been described in Communication Arts magazine as "one of the most original thinkers in design." For many years, he was a Contributing Editor for Print magazine in New York.

Many of his publications concern the involvement of artists, designers, and architects in the development of Modern-era camouflage. His most recent book is Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016). 

In 1985, while teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he launched a “periodical commonplace book” called Ballast Quarterly Review (the title is an acronym for Books Art Language Logic Ambiguity Science and Teaching), which he continued to publish for twenty-one years. All back issues of BALLAST can now be accessed online (and downloaded as pdf files) at <https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast/>.