PSAT Reading Practice Question 640

Question: 640

This passage is adapted from a 2012 article on -blackletter typeface.
The familiar, somewhat calligraphic
anachronism that today we often refer to as
Old English did not emerge until the 12th
century, around the time of the extinction of
05the Old English language. The Old English
script or, more accurately, blackletter, is in
reality not even English but evolved in medi-
eval universities along the Franco-German
border as an efficient alternative to both the
10highly variable "insular" scripts of England
and Ireland, and the consistent though cum-
bersome Carolingian minuscule of Christian
monasteries.
In 1454, Johannes Gutenberg carved an
15unusually ornamental blackletter script
called "textualis" for his much-celebrated
movable type printing press and a year
later used the font to print his 42-line Bible.
Compared with their Carolingian anteced-
20ents, the letters of textualis are distinct for
their height, narrowness, and sharp angu-
larity. The style enjoyed a brief period of
popularity in the late 15th century but was
crippled by an overabundance of labyrin-
25thine derivatives; such as the "littera textualis
formata" used for ornamental books and the
cursive "littera textualis currens" used for
glosses. Although textualis was rarely used
in printing after Gutenberg, the revolution-
30ary scale of his innovation firmly established
blackletter—particularly the Schwabacher
and Fraktur varieties—as the preferred script
for printed texts throughout Europe.
As the immediate successor of textualis,
35the Schwabacher style strove for increased
readability with significant reductions to
capital embellishment and a smoother, more
curvaceous form invocative of handwriting.
Though Schwabacher is sometimes associ-
40ated with the Italian humanist writings of
the early 16th century, it saw substantial
use throughout all of Europe and was only
partially deposed by Fraktur in the late 1700s.
Schwabacher continued to appear in printed
45texts as a secondary typeface into the 20th
century.
By far the most familiar blackletter style,
Fraktur originated at the end of the 15th
century through a commission of the Holy
50Roman Emperor Maximilian I; by the end of
the 16th, it was the most widely used type-
face in Europe. Though far less calligraphic
than textualis, Fraktur is nonetheless more
intricate than Schwabacher and combines
55the soft readability of the latter with the bold
regality of the former. By the 18th century,
Fraktur had achieved such ubiquity that it
became colloquially synonymous with the
blackletter style.
60Predictably, the cosmopolitan classicists
of the 18th century began to prefer the mar-
ginalized Antiqua scripts of prior centuries,
which, being modeled after ancient Roman
letterforms, eschewed medieval ornamen-
65tation altogether. Antiqua's subversion of
blackletter began gradually, appearing pri-
marily in scientific texts (which valued read-
ability over appearance), while literature and
newspapers adhered to more aesthetic styles.
70By the start of the 20th century, the majority
of the Western world had accepted Antiqua
typefaces as the standard font, but blacklet-
ter remained disproportionately common in
German-speaking nations.
75A lethal blow was dealt to blackletter
when, on January 3, 1941, Nazi chancellery
Martin Borrmann issued the Schrifterlass
decree to all of Germany's public offices,
which described Schwabacher, Fraktur, and
80all other forms of blackletter as Judenlettern,
or "Jewish letters," and prohibited their use
in future printing. It remains to this day
unclear what connection the Nazi party saw
between the Jewish people and blackletter.
85Interestingly, however, it is understood that
subsequent Nazi biblioclasms sometimes
targeted texts based not only on their content
but also their typeface. Blackletter made a
brief return following the war but was soon
90abandoned by a German nation eager to
modernize and reinvent its international
image.

The main purpose of including the Schrifterlass decree in the passage is to

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