There’s no end of speculation, doomsaying and desperate well-wishing about the print industry recently. I’ll save that particular wrestling match for another day, but one important point I think is missing from the debate is that the fate of our typography industry hangs well in the balance.

Everyone’s worried about who will save the newspaper industry — but who will save our font houses?

The House That Garamond Built

Let’s get one point straight from the beginning: I don’t think the print industry is ever completely going away. Ever. There, I just completely dispelled the edge-of-your-seat suspense that had you questioning where you’d be going for your next slab-serif fix, didn’t I?

But things are changing, most definitely. Major papers across the country are folding, and seemingly untouchable magazines — even in the UK market, where print is still king — are quietly going the way of the dodo. I never thought I’d see the day when Blender, Domino and EGM would all close in the same calendar year, and that has me worrying: where will all the good type go?

Right now, a myriad of tiny font houses dot the countryside. Passionate tinkerers play with x-heights, ascenders and descenders to capture just the right tone for the medium. And today, magazines and newspapers are the vehicles utilizing and pushing that innovation in type.

The image above, for example, is a little font family known as Stag. In 2005 Esquire magazine commissioned type designer Christian Schwartz to develop Stag in order to get a punchier font for their headlines. According to Schwartz, “They had been using Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s sharply elegant Mercury for several years, and decided it was time to add an additional element to their typographic palette.” The result is impressive: 16 beautifully balanced weights and styles in the family, with an additional 14 from the later Stag Sans that came out of it as well. But if it weren’t for Esquire‘s art budget, it would have never seen the drawing board.

So I’m worried. There are plenty of type-promoting sites and blogs out there — the newly-relaunched Typographica is a great example, as are sites like The FontFeed, Fleuron, and so on. But a good deal of what these sites promote is the use of type in print, not on the web. For the same reasons that we need big-budget publications around to fund our best examples of journalism, so too do we need those same publications around in order to fund the Next Great Type Experiment.

Again, print isn’t going anywhere. Every new communication medium has always sounded the siren calls of “the death of [insert previous mediums here],” and so far they’re all still here. The change is that now there are that many more avenues toward readers’ eyes, and the pie slices keep getting thinner. Will Wired be able to bust $60,000 per issue on their art budget for much longer? I hope so. But if that ever gets trimmed back, I remain skeptical that a Kindle DX is going to be adequate means of picking up the typographical slack.