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Editor’s Note: While publishing two special issues in celebration of our first half-century of literary publishing, Tampa Review editors appreciated the chance to reflect on our journal’s typography and identity. In Tampa Review 54 we shared some of our conclusions about its types in a full-page colophon entitled “Companion, Palatino, and Tampa Review.”  However, even with the luxury of a whole page to work with,  we found there was more to say than the space permitted. We directed interested readers here to Tampa Review Online for the somewhat more complete discussion you will find below.

The typefaces you read in Tampa Review and Tampa Review Online provide a unifying visual structure and identity for the journal while also effectively conveying the literary content. In one sense, the types should be invisible, transparently leading readers past the surface appearance of their black strokes and curves on the page or screen to the meanings and impacts the writers achieve through written language. However, in another sense, they are the very essence of the journal, especially important to Tampa Review as “a literary gallery space in print.” Just as an art gallery experience is markedly different if the space in which viewers encounter new works of art resembles an abandoned warehouse with the paintings leaning up against dirty brick walls or propped against derelict machinery, as opposed to the same works presented on freshly painted walls, perfectly lit by track lighting, in a climate-controlled, polished-glass and varnished-wood interior specifically designed for the purpose.

Presentation matters. And it is especially important to us at Tampa Review. As we explain on our website: “The design of the magazine affirms a tradition of excellence in book arts hearkening back to illuminated manuscripts. The editors believe that contemporary works resonate most powerfully within a great tradition.”

Partly because we are published at an academic institution—The University of Tampa—we see ourselves intentionally affirming values and intellectual history of higher education that began with Plato’s Academy in golden-age Athens. We value knowledge and thought. We affirm that these values exist in relationship, and that they resonate and connect.

In Tampa Review these connections are found in our efforts to be both local and global and to suggest links between contemporary visual and verbal art as expressions of contemporary culture. And, of course, this also brings us back to the typefaces that present our face to the world.

When we expanded and redesigned Tampa Review in 1987, we wanted to choose a type for the journal that would be compatible with our mission, one that would embrace continuities with the past while fully committing to the new. Digital type and desktop publishing were still relatively new, and though digital type had been in the works since the 1960s, there were few designers whose work seemed to embody the qualities we sought.

Hermann Zapf in 1960.

Fortunately, there was Hermann Zapf. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1918, Zapf had suffered poverty under the Third Reich. He left school at fifteen and managed to find an apprenticeship as a photographic re-toucher. He began teaching himself calligraphy, and as soon as he completed his apprenticeship, he moved to Frankfurt in search of a job. He soon found menial employment with a graphic studio, Werkstatt Haus zum Fürsteneck, which was directed by Paul Koch, son of the influential German calligrapher and type designer Rudolf Koch. It was in Frankfurt that Zapf made contact with the German typefoundry of D. Stempel and the firm of German Linotype GmbH. He designed his first typeface for Stempel in 1938, and thus began his designs for metal type, working with a highly skilled punchcutter August Rosenberger.

Palatino specimen from Adcraft Typographers, Inc.

Palatino originated as a traditional foundry type designed by Zapf in the spirit of an old-style serif type. It was initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by Linotype and others. He named it for the sixteenth-century Italian calligrapher Giambattista Palatino, and the type preserves elements of lettering from the earlier fine-book tradition of the scribes who helped shape the humanist types of the Italian Renaissance. With the variable widths of curves and stems, the letterforms echo the movements of a broad nib pen, preserving a sense of the motions of the calligrapher’s hand.

Unlike most Renaissance typeface revivals, which tend to have delicate proportions, such as a low x-height (short lower-case letters and longer ascenders and descenders), Palatino has a larger x-height and shorter descenders, which we found both readable and historically appealing.

Printing and typesetting had undergone rapid change in the twentieth century. Not long after Zapf designed his Palatino foundry type for letterpress printing, the trend moved rapidly to photographic typesetting and offset lithographic printing. Zapf soon adapted his Palatino type for photographic setting and worked with Linotype to release it for photosetter. But the changes were not nearly over, and Zapf soon began exploring digital renderings of Palatino.

Which brings us back to 1987. When we began looking for a digital typeface with history, elegance, grace, and readability, we were drawn to Hermann Zapf’s Palatino for all the right reasons.

It remained the face for Tampa Review through Issue 49 in 2014. Then, as we celebrated fifty years of literary publishing, we were fortunate to be able to add a new exclusive and distinctive typeface to the journal: Companion Old Style.

Frederic Goudy at his matrix engraving machine.

And this brings us to another story and another important twentieth-century type designer. Frederic Goudy was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1865, 53 years before Zapf, so he is closer to us geographically, and a little further from us in time. Goudy is probably the best known American type designer, and he conveys a commitment to handcraft and calligraphy. Goudy was influenced by the revival of fine printing inspired by William Morris and his Kelmscott Press, but he also developed his own techniques of hand lettering with an influence from advertising. Goudy became the typographical consultant of the Monotype Corporation, and he taught himself all the steps in the making of type, eventually establishing his own foundry and bringing all the processes of designing and casting types within his own hands.

Companion Old Style Italic as Goudy displayed it in A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography.

Goudy had already achieved distinction with types issued by ATF, America’s leading type foundry, when he was commissioned by Henry B. Quinan, Art Director for the Woman’s Home Companion, to design a type for exclusive use of their magazine. The result was Companion Old Style roman and italic, which the magazine first introduced with a fanfare in June 1931. They used the type throughout the 1930s, including first presentations of literary work by Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, Dorothy Canfield, John Steinbeck, Shirley Jackson, and Eleanor Roosevelt, but the type was gradually phased out and the magazine became one of the first in the US to adopt Times New Roman as a type in 1943.

Companion was never commercially available, and it was long thought to have been entirely lost. Fortunately, a single surviving set of matrices was discovered by hobby printer Lester Feller in Chicago in 1976, and TR editor Richard Mathews and artist Barbara Russ, at that time directing Konglomerati Florida Foundation for Literature and the Book Arts, handset, printed, and bound the first book ever set in Companion types, Water Colors by the Ohio poet Hale Chatfield, issued in 1979. Many years later, after Mathews had joined the faculty at the University of Tampa, Les and Elaine Feller established the Feller Family Collections at the Tampa Book Arts Studio, and through their generosity and support from a David Delo Research Grant, the mats found a permanent home at the Studio.

While preparing a keepsake in celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Frederic Goudy, we were fortunate to learn that Steve Matteson, Type Director at Monotype Imaging, had created a digital version of Companion, and he made this available to us in 2015 for our 50th Anniversary celebration in Tampa Review 50. Tampa Review 50 marked the first use of Matteson’s version of Companion in any magazine. We were consciously seeking to express our unique identity, and given that the Tampa Book Arts Studio, our letterpress and fine printing laboratory, had just acquired the only surviving matrices for casting Companion type, we wanted to show off our rare, exclusive typeface. And we wanted our “Number 50” to look special in observance of our fifty years of publishing. We even included a hand-printed letterpress card, set by hand in metal Companion types we had cast from the long-lost matrices, proclaiming Tampa Review to be “your literary companion” for fifty years.

Companion had been designed by Goudy as a display type, and he described it as having “greater consistent original features than any other face I have ever made.” It was used in Woman’s Home Companion for titles, headings, and captions—never for text. But when digital type designer Steve Matteson showed us his new digital rendering, we could not resist a complete commitment.

Tampa Review 50, published in 2015, was set entirely in Companion, both text and display. And it proved to be quite readable, though one characteristic of its design that worked well for titles—its unusually long ascenders and descenders—caused problems when set into lines of text. As seen in the examples below, the ascenders and descenders tended to meet. Since that time, we have experimented with Companion in a number of ways.

We made adjustments starting in TR 51/52, increasing the leading (the white space between lines), and by the time we reached TR 53, we had finessed the line spacing and were learning more about the strengths and weaknesses of Companion as a text face. Adding leading created the necessary space between lines, but it also increased the overall white space on an already “light” page, due to the delicate serifs and fine strokes of Companion. While readable in smaller sizes, the overall impact of a full page of Companion type was lighter, lacier, and more “gray” than we wanted­­—the “color” of a full page seemed not quite as weighty and solid as we felt the literary texts deserved.

There were also some significant practical disadvantages: the need for increased leading meant that fewer lines would fit on a page, which meant having to add extra pages (and costs) to each issue. Also, a long-term commitment to Companion for setting texts meant we would lose (and miss) the ability to use a variety of useful type weights—boldface and semibold in both roman and italic—which are often useful in designing an issue and meeting requirements writers placed upon texts.

In short, we found ourselves thinking fondly of the font that Tampa Review had first selected—Palatino. Designed, like Companion, originally for metal type, Palatino bridged the transition from hot type to digital. Zapf himself was fully involved in creating the original foundry type and remained involved with its later release for digital typesetting. In fact, Zapf had been recognized with the Frederic W. Goudy Award from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969 and in 1976 was appointed to the world’s first endowed professorship in Typographic Computer Programs at RIT.

Both Zapf and Goudy were looking back with reverence at the warmth of the humanist style of letter forms, both designers preserving the thick-and-thin variations in line weight made by the pen nib in the hand of the calligrapher from the pre-printing age. These two types share open counters, wide bowls, a bracketed but nearly-hairline serif, and a readability on the page.

Palatino type has recently been the subject of an entire book, Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface, by the Canadian poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst. Here he wonderfully articulates many of the values and meanings we find in both of our types. He points out that type design “traces an unspoken but close relationship between the visual arts and literature,” and he explains:

“Letters, that is, have something in common with words: they are much more, as well as nothing more, than signifiers or symbols. They are small and transitory marks made on the surfaces of things in a man-made world, yet they open into the depths of a world where humans are no more than incidental participants.” As Bringhurst reminds us, “type design can participate, like other arts, in something more important and durable than humans, namely the beauty of being itself.”

Bringhurst’s careful, intelligent, poetic and artistic study of Palatino suggests that “Letterforms have often been regarded as honorary lifeforms, inanimate and inorganic objects that can, at the whim of human beings and for purely human convenience, be described as living things.” He suggests that humans co-evolve with their languages in a symbiotic relationship “in which the profit flows both ways” and in which the present forms found in current technologies express the present moment while “retaining certain formal characteristics of great antiquity.” Hermann Zapf articulated a similar idea in a talk at the Library of Congress in 1974: “Type design is a creative art, based on the technologies of the past, which reflects the technologies of both the present and the future. Type design is one of the most visible visual expressions of an age. . . . The hand and personality of the lettering artist actually create the forms that make lasting impressions on the reader. . . . A good design has life, as does every expression of art.”

We hope that readers will subliminally sense both immediacy and history in the typeforms of our journal. With the two types in Tampa Review 54—now also visible here on the pages of Tampa Review Online—we think we have found the right combination of our original text font, Palatino, accompanied by our unique Companion Old Style, for titles and display as it was originally employed in Companion magazine. Using both typefaces we hope will be a statement of identity that connects with our own Tampa Review design history, as well as with the historic calligraphic, letterpress, and literary traditions expressed by two brilliant type designers. At the same time we continue to reach forward with digital tools as well as material artifacts to sustain the handcraft traditions and human touches we believe to be vital expressions of beauty and meaning—vital and living expressions of art.

One of the most vibrant literary gatherings in the world takes place each year in Medellín, Colombia: The International Poetry Festival of Medellín or Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín. Founded in 1991, the Festival has consistently offered poetry as an eloquent counterweight to the violence so much associated with the city. It was awarded a Right Livelihood Award in 2006, a prize sometimes referred to as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” with a citation that it was given “for showing how creativity, beauty, free expression and community can flourish amongst and overcome even deeply entrenched fear and violence.” The award and the Festival have taken on special significance in the months since this summer’s gathering. This year when the Nobel Prize Committee announced that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the news came just days after Colombian Laureates of the Right Livelihood Award had called for a ‘Yes’ vote in the failed October referendum on the peace deal with the FARC.

Tampa Review Fiction Editor Yuly Restrepo was born in Medellín. In 2001, at the height of Colombia’s civil war, she and her family moved to the United States, where they were granted political asylum. Yuly is now a naturalized citizen of the United States, and a writing professor at the University of Tampa. In the summer of 2016, she traveled to Medellín to work on and do research for her novel-in-progress, which is set in Colombia and deals with the country’s civil war. During her time there, she attended and wrote about the poetry festival, which coincided with the signing of a peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC, which has resulted in a cease fire, after over fifty years of violence. Yuly is shown at left in a photo from the trip at the foot of the Puente de Occident, or Bridge of the West, about 50 miles north of Medellín, Colombia. —Ed.

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The first event I attended at this year’s 26^th Annual International Poetry Festival of Medellín was a reading meant to showcase contemporary Colombian poetry. On an overcast Sunday afternoon, seven young Colombian poets gathered at the Otraparte Museum/Café, created and built for the purpose of preserving and spreading the legacy of the great Colombian writer Fernando González. They performed their work to an attentive, if small, audience. But the Festival was just getting started, and there was a significant community event competing for attendance that afternoon.

The first reader, local costumbrist poet Lina Trujillo, thanked the audience for attending on an afternoon when one of the city’s soccer teams, Deportivo Independiente Medellín, would play the championship match of the Colombian tournament. The reading featured poets from Medellín and other Colombian cities, and poets who, like many other Colombians, live outside the country. Hector Cañón stood out among them, with an undeniably environmental focus, as well as some work on the violence that has besieged Colombia for so long. This last aspect of his work is evidenced in lines such as “I come from seeing fathers and mothers crying/over the deaths of their children/with fallible anticipation.” Another standout was Fredy Yezzed, who in “The Unpublished Diary of the Viennese Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein” writes, “1.1 Poetry is a garden: a garden that speaks of other gardens.”

Later that night, as I rode the metro amid screams of celebrating soccer fans clad in red and blue jerseys, I thought about the absolute attention of the audience at Otraparte, and I remembered my first poetry festival six years earlier. Back then, people packed public squares and let the rain soak them, sometimes to listen to poets who read in English or Dutch, whose work no one had translated for them. I realized that, even if the numbers didn’t compare, poetry fans in Medellín could be as fervent as the people waving flags on the street and sending fireworks into the night sky to celebrate the team’s victory.

The following days reaffirmed this feeling. The festival, which took place June 18-25, 2016, featured more than 110 poets from countries ranging from Burkina Faso to Australia, including representatives from indigenous nations, such as the Mapuche from Chile and the Zoque from Mexico. It consistently had well-attended or packed venues. The poets spent their week in Medellín offering readings, lectures, workshops, and conversations to audiences from many age groups and walks of life. Additionally, the festival held film screenings, musical performances, and plays in venues ranging from universities to museums to public parks.

This year the festival had two main themes: the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud and the Eleusinian Mysteries. To expand upon the latter, Boston University’s Carl A. P. Ruck, co-author of The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, participated in several events to celebrate the memory of this ancient city and its rites. As for Rimbaud, Colombian writers like Albeiro Montoya and Juan Manuel Roca, as well as French poet Alain Borer, discussed the poet’s work and life.

The festival, organized and sponsored by Prometeo, one of the oldest literary magazines in Colombia, has grown exponentially since its inception in 1991. That year, sixteen Colombian poets decided to hold an event called “A Day with Poetry” at the iconic Cerro Nutibara, a hill located square in the center of the city, better known for its tourist attraction, the Pueblito Paisa, a model of the traditional small Antioquian town.

Prometeo became involved in the festival the following year, when thirty-seven poets from eight European and American countries participated. That year, the event also began to integrate musical performances, as well as lectures and film screenings. The unexpected attendance, about 20,000 people total, led the organizers to improvise readings on the streets, using megaphones instead of microphones, for the people who crowded outside the packed venues.

The growth has steadily continued. In 1992, a representative from an indigenous nation, the Kuna-Tule from Panama, participated in the festival for the first time. In 1996, thanks to the success of the festival, the first School of Poetry was held, an event that has taken place ever since. In 1999, the festival offered the first prize for poetry in the Castilian language. In 2005, events from the festival aired on television for the first time, and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinca was one of the featured poets. In 2009, the festival was declared part of Colombia’s cultural heritage by the national government. In 2011, Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove participated in the festival.

This year, in addition to panels and readings focusing on the legacies of Rimbaud and Eleusis, the festival featured readings that gathered poets from diverse ages, nations, languages and styles. On Thursday evening, I attended a reading featuring Albeiro Montoya (Colombia), Adriana Paredes (Mapuche Nation, Chile), Keki Daruwalla (India), Antonio Trujillo (Venezuela), and Alain Borer (France). By now, the festival organizers have started to provide those who write in a language other than Spanish, and cannot translate their work into Spanish themselves, with both a translator and a local actor who reads their poetry for the audience in Spanish. At this particular reading, the audience was delighted to hear and understand the images in Daruwalla’s poem honoring Federico García Lorca, first in English and then in Spanish: “Sandwiched between your rivers/‘one lament and the other blood’/the land will flame like a tongue/of fiery green/threading the Sierras.” The audience also enjoyed Borer’s extremely brief, surprising poems and his delight at being in Medellín.

The next day I attended Colombian poet Leo Castillo’s lecture on “The Damned Poets.” The lecture took place at the Sala del Concejo of the Antioquia Museum, a room that features an imposing mural by maestro Pedro Nel Gomez entitled La República, which depicts important events in the liberation and development of the Colombian nation. The room was packed with about 150 people, and the lecture turned into a spirited debate. When it became evident that Castillo was more interested in discussing details of the poets’ private lives, such as Paul Verlaine’s proclivity for sex workers, or Rimbaud’s possible homosexuality, than about their work, the audience took it upon itself to become an active participant in the conversation and demand a better quality of work from the presenter.

A few days later, I went to EAFIT University’s campus to listen to the work of Rubén Darío Lotero (Colombia), Judith Crispin (Australia), Hugo Mujica (Argentina), and Samm Monro, aka Comrade Fatso (Zimbabue). The Colombian poet read short vignettes from everyday Colombian life, while the Zimbabwean entertained the crowd with his spoken word style focused on the social and political ills of his country. The Australian, with her expansive, dreamlike poetry, was also well received. However, it was the Argentine, with lines such as “He fell weightless/like eyelids,/at nightfall or a leaf/when the wind rather than whip away, sways,” which he wrote about the death of his father, who won over the audience completely.

The closing ceremony, a reading marathon featuring most of the participating poets, took place at Parque de los Deseos, and again was packed. People in attendance wore t-shirts with Rimbaud’s likeness printed on them and carried around festival tote bags and the festival edition of Prometeo magazine, which includes work by all the participating poets, in English and Spanish, as well as Carl A. P. Ruck’s essay “Memory of Eleusis.”

I had to ask myself why in a country where the population reads an average of one book per year, this festival has such massive success, and why attendance has soared to hundreds of thousands. I’ve pondered the question in the days since the closing ceremony, and I think the answer goes back to what the poets who founded the festival had in mind when they got together for the first time in 1991. In that year, war was on every Colombian’s mind. The cartel wars, the war on drugs, the war between the guerrillas and the government. In 1991, bombings, drive-by shootings, political assassinations, and massacres in public areas were daily occurrences in Medellín. War was on everyone’s lips, and fear was in everyone’s thoughts. So the festival came as a response to that fear. It started because the city’s spirit was broken and in dire need of repair. It began because poetry was a way to create and reaffirm life in a place where death was our daily bread. In a city that still had some of its darkest days ahead, poetry served as a way to get closer to the light. It has been so for twenty-six years in a row.

On June 23, 2016, during the week of the festival, the Colombian government and the FARC signed a peace agreement, after more than fifty years of civil war. The rebels agreed to a final cease fire and future reintegration into society. The country met the possibility of peace with joy and trepidation. After all, the war has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced from their homes. It has left more than fifty years of destruction and suffering. The trepidation will continue for some time to come, but so will the joy. And through it all, in the city of Medellín, there will remain the life-giving power of poetry—and the masses who will come to be part of an event that stands against war and fear and death.