By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; C07

"EA T AT

JOE'S PLACE"

That's what the Dallas billboard urged in large, bold letters. But for Robert B. Andrews, it was the medium more than the message that proved eye-opening -- and eye-relaxing.

He was a student editor at Southern Methodist University at the time of his epiphany, the late 1940s. He instantly realized that the configuration of the four words -- the first two stacked atop the last two -- represented an easier, more natural way to read.

He would come to believe that words clustered in smaller, more vertical columns, or "thought units" of three or four words, could be read as a whole, with a single eye fixation, and that it would make all the difference.

Andrews, 79, who died April 16 of pancreatic cancer at his home in Darnestown, never gave up on his reading concept, which he called "Square Span." It's only been in recent years, however, that innovative printing technology has allowed his vision to become reality.

Born in Dallas and a resident of Darnestown for more than 30 years, he first wrote about his reading concept in 1948 in a term paper for an English class at SMU.

He argued that it was time to improve upon the thin, single line of type stretching across a page, the accepted format since Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago.

Andrews contended that is an unnatural format because it forces a reader's eyes to ignore the tendency to see words above or below the single line. Clustering words, he insisted, would increase reading speed, reduce eyestrain and mimic the phasing of a reader's voice.

The term paper caught the attention of his professor, who helped him get it published in the January 1949 issue of Texas Outlook, a publication of the Texas State Teachers Association. A Reader's Digest version appeared in July 1949.

The national magazine story prompted a burst of public enthusiasm, but interest gradually faded, in part because converting conventional text into small word units caused daunting problems for typesetters.

Andrews never lost interest, but he got on with his life. He received an undergraduate degree in journalism from SMU in 1951 and served in the Army during the Korean War.

He worked briefly as a reporter for International News Service, the Wall Street Journal and the Galveston Tribune before joining Mobil in 1955 at its Beaumont, Tex., refinery.

He was a regional public relations adviser in Dallas for Mobil's corporate public relations department from 1959 to 1962 and manager of public relations for the company's North American division in New York from 1962 to 1976. He moved to the corporate government relations office in Washington in 1978, becoming a government relations manager and liaison to the American Petroleum Institute.

He and his wife also raised four children -- Robert K. Andrews of Braddock Heights, Brian B. Andrews of New Market, Thomas B. Andrews of Monrovia and Rebecca Andrews O'Conor of Damascus -- and eventually had three grandsons.

Rebecca O'Conor recalled hearing about the Reader's Digest article when she was growing up and trying to put it into practice without really understanding it.

"It was more as I got older that I began to figure out how it worked," she said. She intends to try it out with her 8-year-old son.

Almost a decade before Andrews retired in 1991, he received a call from a New England entrepreneur, David H. Knight, who said he had read the Reader's Digest article as a 13-year-old and had considered it a godsend for someone like himself who had trouble reading. "I've been talking about it all my life," Knight said in an interview yesterday.

In 2000, Knight called Andrews again, this time to let him know that he and his son, Andrew Knight, had formed the Cambridge Reading Project, a company based in New Hampshire that had perfected a technique for efficiently converting text into the small thought units that Andrews advocated.

"Friendly Type" is the name the Knights gave to his Square Span concept. Andrews became an unofficial adviser to the company, which has translated "The 9/11 Commission Report," Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," several children's stories and other books into the concept.

"Considering the amount of time we spend reading, don't we owe it to ourselves and future generations to examine experimental reading concepts with a positive, open mind to seek superior formats?" Andrews asked during lunch with the Knights last fall in Potomac.

He had just learned he had cancer, recalled Sue Wilson Andrews, his wife of 54 years. For the next three months, she said, he spurned medication. He wanted to make sure his mind was clear enough to bequeath his ideas to people who shared his enthusiasm for a better way to read.