...about something I had imagined that hardly anyone would agree with him about. (His views on the importance of cultural authenticity, I believe, are widely shared these days.)
And it isn't just anyone who is in agreement with him. It's Stanley Morison, no less.
Here's the quote, from his First Principles of Typography:
"It does no harm to print a Christmas card in black letter, but who nowadays would read a book in that type? I may believe, as I do, that black letter is in design more homogenous, more lively and more economic a type than the grey round roman we use, but I do not now expect people to read a book in it. Aldus' and Caslon's are both relatively feeble types, but they represent the forms accepted by the community; and the printer, as a servant of the community, must use them, or one of their variants. No printer should say, 'I am an artist, therefore I am not to be dictated to. I will create my own letter forms', for, in this humble job, no printer is an artist in this sense."
While he is not at all sanguine about the prospects of shifting the general preference, and in this respect he may differ from Hrant, he is in agreement that black letter is "better", in whatever sense one wishes to take that term.
I had thought it to be obvious that black letter was objectively less legible (and, indeed, far less legible), and one could demonstrate that by, for example, subjecting specimens of black letter and Roman type each to a two-dimensional Fourier transform, and observing the much greater high-frequency content in the former.
), writer, artist, musician, designer etc. who got into fonts because I thought it was a great way to expand my graphics design/webdesign business. Well, it did so...to the point that the former is now the sidegig to the fontmaking.