Warde is best known for her 1930 dinner-speech-cum-essay, “The Crystal Goblet,” the
epitome of her inviting and accessible prose promoting typography’s mission. “Printing,” she
said, “should be invisible.” Like the finest crystal, the finest typography “is calculated to reveal
rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.... Type well used is
invisible as type.... But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that
crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.”44 Morison wrote
similarly: “Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally
aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between
author and reader is wrong.”. . .
 In his cranky
1940 speech “Harsh Words,” for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, book designer T. M.
Cleland evoked this paradox. On typography, he echoed Warde and Benton: “If it is an art at all,
it is an art to serve another art.... It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and
when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionist antics of its own, it is just a bad
servant.” Like Warde, he mourned the loss of serifs as “simplification for simpletons, and those
are block letters for blockheads.”
Warde is best known for her 1930 dinner-speech-cum-essay, “The Crystal Goblet,” the epitome of her inviting and accessible prose promoting typography’s mission. “Printing,” she said, “should be invisible.” Like the finest crystal, the finest typography “is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.... Type well used is invisible as type.... But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.”44 Morison wrote similarly: “Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between author and reader is wrong.”. . . In his cranky 1940 speech “Harsh Words,” for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, book designer T. M. Cleland evoked this paradox. On typography, he echoed Warde and Benton: “If it is an art at all, it is an art to serve another art.... It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionist antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.” Like Warde, he mourned the loss of serifs as “simplification for simpletons, and those are block letters for blockheads.”