Styles in all things change, and for reasons that are unclear to me, the habit of double-spacing faded away. In this 1846 pocket volume for newlywed women, the sentences are as spaced out as the advice. I’m not prepared to aver that double spaces at the ends of sentences arose from crass commercial concerns, but I think it makes a quality rumor, and you can say you saw it here first.
He developed what we now call italics as a way to jam more type onto the page to save money on paper. And Aldus Manutius was famous as a thrifty, profit-conscious printer. In the early days of handset type, having the flexibility to exaggerate the spaces between sentences must have been a boon to quickly setting justified type. Twenty years before Manutius, the French printer Nicolas Jenson, also working in Venice, used a spacing scheme that looks quite contemporary, with single word spaces applied between sentences. Other contemporary printed works - including those by Signore Manucci - use “normal” spacing. But the spaces between sentences are much bigger than a single word space, and they carry the brunt of the work of filling out the lines. The spacing used to justify these lines from Bembo’s 1495 work De Aetna is pretty irregular. Below is a sample from “De Aetna,” by Pietro Bembo (who gave his name to the typeface used in it) and printed by Aldus Manutius (né Teobaldo Manucci) in Venice in 1495. The earliest printed example of exaggerated inter-sentence spacing that I could find is a hoary one indeed. This American type sample catalogue shows that in 1808, using the equivalent of double word spaces between sentences was the style of the day. The practice in those days was hardly universal, though, and many contemporaneous anglophone volumes - John Baskerville’s 1763 Bible, for example - show the spacing that we now regard as the norm that is, a single word space between sentences. Declaration of Independence does likewise. Disruptive by modern standards, they were all the rage when this was originally set, back in 1774. It also uses ems after sentences.Īpart from the funny ss used to set this letterpress page, the thing that catches the eye most are the holes created by the big spaces between sentences. The oldest type sample I have on hand is a replica of an American short story set in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1774. That book, though - a Dutch theological bibliography - uses em spaces (which are more or less equivalent to two word spaces) after periods. I am not a type historian, nor am I an antiquarian book collector, so the oldest printed book I own dates only to 1819. The first patents for related gizmos appeared about 50 years earlier. The first commercially available typewriters - the only ones that could arguably have been influential enough to change typographic habits - didn’t appear until the 1860s. More on that later.īut the use of double spaces (or other exaggerated spacing) after a period is a typographic convention with roots that far predate the typewriter. It’s a fact that people who first learned typing on a typewriter were indeed taught that you should always use two spaces after a sentence-ending period. Traditional wisdom on the subject asserts that using two word spaces after sentences is left over from the days of the typewriter. I’m going to try to put an end to the argument here. It’s the debate that refuses to die: Do you set one word space or two after a period? In all my years of writing about type, it’s still the question I hear most often, and a search of the web will find threads galore on the subject.