In response to Katie's original post, I find that these "western" designed novels inspire today's typography movement. Today's typography is clean and encourages the use of white space. While the earlier dime novel examples show many typefaces together, I wonder if the idea of combining multiple typefaces (which is popular in modern typography) stemmed from the combination of typefaces used in design during this era. In modern typography/design, I think its safe to say that most designers will use 2-3 typefaces per piece. However, these early dime novels illustrate five or more. During the early years of design, many designers drew typefaces by hand for individual pieces, or specified particular typefaces with typesetters who in turn had to individually set each letter in a word in the requested typeface. Whether they were hand drawn, or arranged by a typesetter, it's seems as though an enormous amount of time was likely spent on generating a piece that had so many varying typefaces. Why were so many typefaces hand drawn especially when there were many typefaces readily available during the 18th and 19th centuries, like Baskerville, Bodoni, Didot, Clarendon, Akzidenz Grotesk, etc? Then again, I guess the same question could be asked today with the development of so many typefaces, a designer can become lost in alphabet hell.
I found this interesting blog that actually addresses what design is projected to look like in twenty some years. It's a possibility that history might actually repeat itself (like it does for so many things) and revert back to a very wide, diverse range of typefaces within one single design piece (Click here, number 5) and that the amount of typefaces will be so overwhelmingly similar that typeface designers will have to go to extreme lengths to make their fonts unique.
