Kinetic Typography Journal — SWE-2 one-shot demo

On a wall in Pompeii, two thousand years ago, a Roman scratched the word et so quickly that the two letters fused into one stroke. The wall is rubble now, but the shortcut survived. It is on your keyboard between the 7 and the 8, it opens every HTML entity on this page, and it is probably the most-drawn glyph in any type designer’s sketchbook: the ampersand.

1 The shortcut

The ampersand is a ligature — two letters run together until they forget they were ever apart. The letters are e and t: Latin for and. In the swift cursive hands of first-century Rome, a scribe writing et did not lift the stylus between the e’s exit stroke and the t’s entry, and the pair began to collapse. Graffiti from Pompeii already show the fusion; the letters were doing their disappearing act before Vesuvius did its own.

A different shorthand mark is often confused with the ampersand: the Tironian et (⁊), devised for Cicero’s secretary Tiro. It looks like a small 7, was never an e–t ligature at all, and still survives in Irish Gaelic signage. Same job, different glyph.

Medieval scribes inherited the habit and refined it. Carolingian copyists kept the et ligature as a standard sort; insular hands made it loopier; Gothic hands made it black and brisk. When printing arrived, the ligature came along — Gutenberg’s Bible is full of fused ets, and the early Italian printers who invented roman and italic type cut ampersands as a matter of course. The italic versions, drawn freer and more cursive, are where the e and the t are easiest to spot: the e rises and opens, the t crosses itself inside the loop. Look at a good italic ampersand and you can still read the Latin word it ate.

2 The name

For most of its life the glyph had no name of its own — it was simply how you wrote and. It got one by accident, in a classroom. Nineteenth-century English primers listed the character as a quasi-letter, and when schoolchildren chanted the alphabet they ended …X, Y, Z, and per se and: “and, by itself, and.” Slur that at recitation speed, over and over, generation after generation, and you get ampersand. The word is a fossil of the alphabet song — a name made entirely of children talking too fast.

Dictionaries date ampersand to the 1830s. The same schoolyard mechanism produced the phrase’s cousins in other languages: in French the glyph is et commercial, in German the kaufmännisches Und — the “commercial and.” Only English named it for the way children sang.

By then the glyph had already done two thousand years of work. It had been the twenty-seventh character children were taught, the mark grocers wrote on chalkboards, the abbreviation bookkeepers leaned on. It is the only character in common use whose name describes a child describing a character.

3 The designer’s glyph

Ask a type designer which glyph they labor over longest and the answer is rarely a letter. The ampersand is a freehand flourish with a day job — the one character where a designer may show off. William Caslon’s italic ampersand, cut in the 1730s, sweeps upward like something written with a pointed quill on a very good day; it remains the connoisseur’s benchmark. Eric Goudy drew ampersands compulsively and admitted as much. In 1953 Jan Tschichold devoted an entire monograph to the mark, collecting nearly three hundred historical forms — the only glyph ever to receive its own scholarly biography from a master of the craft.

Tschichold’s Formenwandlungen der et-Zeichen appeared in English as The Ampersand: Its Origin and Development. He traced the same e–t fusion through four centuries of handwriting with the patience of a man cataloging butterflies.

Fig. 1One glyph, five treatments — all drawn by the two fonts that set this journal. No other character is licensed to improvise like this.

The ampersand is also the most promiscuous glyph in the business of names. It joins law firms and design studios, AT&T and H&M, Ben & Jerry’s and M&M’s. In Hollywood it performs subtle contract law: screen credits distinguish “written by X and Y” — two writers who worked separately — from “written by X & Y,” a bona fide team. The whole difference between collaboration and succession is carried by one character’s personality.

The Writers Guild of America formalized the distinction: an ampersand in a credit denotes a writing team; the word and denotes successive, separate work. A single glyph is doing contractual labor on every poster.

No other glyph is asked to be so useful and so beautiful at once.
From this story

4 The rules, loosely

Typographers guard the ampersand with a small etiquette: it belongs in firm names, credits, tables and display copy, not as a lazy replacement for and in running text — though even that rule relaxes for the italic version, which some houses use freely because it is plainly decorative rather than dutiful. Chicago approves it in proper names (Pride & Prejudice got one only on film posters, but the point stands); programmers meanwhile have adopted it wholesale — && for logic, & for addresses — and every HTML file, including this one, must write & to produce a single honest &.

Strip the story down and it is a parable about economy: two letters, repeated millions of times a day, got so familiar with each other that they merged — and the merged form was so charming that nobody ever legislated it away. Languages shed letters constantly. This one was promoted. Somewhere a schoolchild is still slurring and-per-se-and, and somewhere a type designer is still drawing the perfect loop of it, trying to sign their name inside a glyph that used to be a word.

Imogen Hartley writes about the history of printing and the afterlives of obsolete letterforms. She keeps a small drawer of foundry ampersands she cannot entirely justify.

And, per se, and