New Faces

When they opened their papers one morning last week, the 182,511 readers of the Los Angeles Times were pleased to see that that journal had treated itself to a new and more legible format and type dress. The new face which the Times turned to its public was the result of months of cogitation by sober-sided Publisher Harry Chandler and Gilbert P. Farrar, type consultant for American Type Founders Co. Gone were the old-fashioned banked and pyramided headlines. Gone was the seven-point body type at which faithful Times readers had squinted for 26 years. New heads were short, simple sentences split up into two or three lines. New body type was eight-point Paragon on nine-point base, a light, readable letter with plenty of space between the lines.

Fostered by oculists and type salesmen, the idea of lightening the newsprint page with bigger type is a definite trend in U. S. publishing, though few have gone so far as Los Angeles' Times. To revise its format, a paper of the Times's size starts by spending some $10,000 for new type matrices. Because the larger type prints less news per page, at least twro more typesetting machines are needed to compose the additional two or three pages. Such machines cost around $4,500 each, are manned by operators earning $58 to $65 per week.

Other major newspapers which have changed type faces for the better in the past twelvemonth: Boston Herald and Traveler and Transcript; Chicago Herald & Examiner and Tribune; Detroit News; Minneapolis Star; Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.

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