There are further parallels in music. It’s impossible to know what an original Bach symphony sounds like. What we have now are re-creations and performances by contemporary orchestras and instruments. But we don’t dare call them copies, or even think that they’re not original — we consider them on their own terms.

My point is our first exposure to the classics is often by contemporary reinterpretation, or reproduction, in reverse chronological order.

For example, we see images of paintings and sculptures in order to decide whether we want to see the real ones in art galleries. And once we get there, we are not faced with the originals in their original state. The passage of time fades colours, rots canvas and fractures statues. What we often see are the current “state” of the artworks, as interpreted by conservationists trying preserve or restore the works over the intervening centuries. Even in modern art, there are philosophical and practical problems.

One article describes how conservators of modern art are increasingly confronted with the problem of the “elusive original.” “Traditionally, scientific analysis has been able to distinguish authenticity by the nature and age of materials,” she said. But what is the status of the “original” when the artist’s hand wasn’t directly involved in the fabrication of the work?”

In one effort to restore a series of Rothko murals at Harvard, her preservation team used digital coloured light projection to return the works to their original colour. Now, what if the projections alone could produce the same optical effects? Then the “Harvard Murals” could be displayed anywhere in the world, or in multiple places at once, and the paintings themselves could be discarded.

Does digitisation mean an artwork can transcend one medium to another and still be considered the same thing? Would we consider the digital projection to be the original?

In a similar vein, I can imagine almost no contemporary practicing designers have seen or handled the “original” metal Futura fonts. But if you ask them what fonts they’ve been using in their design, they’ll say “Futura, Helvetica, Garamond”. For the people actually using our work, there is no clear difference — it’s not important that they’re not “original”.

Now, as we know there are plain technical things to consider in translating type from one medium to another. For example, which is the ‘original’ form of the metal typeface: the punch, the strike or the print?

This a problem that I came up against trying to digitise this thing, based on the Fell Types. During the process it dawned on me that I was trying to capture an impossible aesthetic, that I was trying to mimic a technology that isn’t used. So I decided to make it as ‘digital’ as possible, to be ‘true’ to the spirit of the thing. I made the points infinitely sharp, I detailed it to be contemporary and rigourous. I want it to be a product of our time and our digital culture.

I think this is what Vanderlans was trying to say. Did he simply want contemporary designers to make contemporary typefaces? Or are we to completely abandon all historical examples?

This is an impossible request.

I often have to turn to other fields for philosophical and practical nourishment. The industrial designer Jasper Morrison says: