Lettres à jour ? self-made notices in France

James Mosley

I have always been delighted by the improvised public notices in France that are made with stencils ? pochoirs, or (to use a more old-fashioned term) lettres à jour ? letters through which you see daylight. Sometimes they are quite elegantly set out and occasionally they are chaotic, but the letters themselves are beautifully drawn and the notices always have a living quality that can never be matched by typesetting or jobs that are made in vinyl by a digital cutter.

Stencilled letters were used in the 17th and 18th centuries to make big liturgical books in France and Germany, and the first description of how to make the stencils themselves was written in the 1690s for the ?Description des Arts et Métiers? ? the account of all trades that was prepared by a little group of specialists for the Academy of Sciences in Paris but most of which was never published, leaving Diderot to carry out the idea in his Encyclopédie. (He never got round to stencils.) In the 18th century stencil alphabets were made for general sale, plain but elegant roman or elaborately fancy script, or you could get labels or visiting cards cut to order. Benjamin Franklin bought some from a supplier in Paris called Béry. In the 19th century stencil letters in France took on the look of bold Didot capitals. Georges Braque used them in his painting Le portugais (1911) to simulate the effect of lettering on posters in a Parisian café, and the idea of using these ?everyday letters? in works of art caught on. In the 1920s El Lissitky and Man Ray incorporated them into designs and photograms. The US designer Paul Rand bought a set in Paris and took them home with him to use in his own designs for book and magazine covers. Le Corbusier used them to mark his sets of architectural drawings.

One of my favourite examples of the professional use of the stencil letter in France is the work that Marcel Jacno did for the Théâtre National Populaire of Jean Vilar in the 1950s. He called the lettering Chaillot, after the Palais de Chaillot in Paris where the company had its base. The informality of the letters conveyed the popular quality of the performances, where for a few francs rising stars like Gérard Philipe and Maria Casarès could be seen in Le Cid. I bought some sets of zinc stencils in Paris for myself, and used them to mark all kinds of things ?including the numbers on the new mobile shelving that were we were installing in the St Bride Library, where they can still be seen.

When a rival to Letraset?s rub-down lettering was being launched in the 1970s I offered my stencils as the model for one of their new types. They were marketed under the original name of ?French Stencil?. Letraset did not get the message for another decade, when Letraset France launched an identical font called ?Charrette?. And then it got into trouble with the Fondation Le Corbusier for having used letters that they were sure had been designed by the great man for his own exclusive use, so the Letraset catalogues obediently marked them ?© Le Corbusier?.

In fact the stencils were made by ?T & C?. That was all they ever told you on the label. But Dave Siegel ? who had plans to make his own stencil type ? told me more:

?Somewhere around 1992, I went to Paris and found the company that makes these stencils they use everywhere. The company is called Thevenon, which at the time was located on rue Montmorency in Paris?s 4th arrondissement.

?There I met Madame Thevenon, the daughter of the man who started the company. she was in her seventies, yet she still ran the company every day. I learned a lot from her, and I?ll summarize here.

?The stencils are produced somewhere in the center of France. In the early 1900s, there were two companies producing stencils ? mostly for signage. both these companies also made many other stamped and cut metal products, and they also made the enameled signs you see everywhere in France for denoting the numbers of the street addresses on all the houses and buildings. It was a friendly competition, and the two companies? products were quite similar. The cool thing about these stencils was that they were designed differently at every size, so you could watch the transformation in design from a few milimeters to 1 meter (their largest size). Sometime in the fifties, the two companies merged to become Thevenon. The other company?s name was dropped.?

Dave Siegel?s plans for his type didn?t work out, but Thevenon & Cie are very much in business, at Gergy, a little Burgundian town not far from Beaune and Chalon. See the town?s web site, which offers walks by the Saône, and gastronomic and cultural pleasures to its visitors. The company makes all kinds of small things in metal, like tokens and signs, and also the traditional stencils. I don?t know if they still make those metre-high ones but I hope so. For Thevenon, see http://www.thevenonsa.com/. If you want to buy stencils off the shelf, try the Bazaar de l?Hôtel de Ville (BHV) in Paris, or any good French ironmonger.

The letter forms of these stencils are brilliantly drawn and type based on them may seem like a good idea. So it is up to a point (I have made one myself), but the trouble is that in use it always lacks the varied alignment and colour which are among the charms of the medium. Just van Rossum tried to get over this with a badly-inked stencil type (Flightcase), but unless you can make a kind of self-degrading stencil font on the model of Beowulf (worth trying perhaps), it does not really rival the real thing.

So my main presentation for ?Temporary type? is a survey of some favourite real-life examples that I have found during the last few years, mostly a long way from big cities, and which I thought good enough to be worth sharing with friends.

How long will this kind of lettering go on being used? Although some designers are imposing dead corporate typography in its place (you no longer find your Eurostar carriage by looking for the big stencilled numbers that used to mark the platform at the Gare du Nord) there are some encouraging contemporary examples with which I end my piece ? from the boating pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, to the high-tech environment of Satolas airport, now l?aéroport Lyon ? Saint Exupéry, and the TGB or Très Grande Bibliothèque, aka Le site François Mitterand de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Tolbiac.