Just my type

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, October 2011; written by Lisa Pearson.

I am a complete nerd. Either that, or Simon Garfield is a really good writer, because I just read his 356-page history of typography, “Just My Type: a book about fonts”, and enjoyed every minute. You might think an entire chapter devoted to the ampersand (&) would be boring, but Garfield manages to mix together the history of the ampersand, the artistic appreciation of its many forms – this is the character with which type designers can most freely express themselves – and a little philosophy. An ampersand signifies a permanent bond, symbolizing the solidity of the partnership. As he points out, Tom and Jerry do nothing but fight, while Ben & Jerry continue to make delicious ice cream together.

Like most people who use computers, I have distinct preferences for fonts. I hate Times New Roman, partly because I lean more towards sans-serif, and partly because it was the default Microsoft font for so long I got tired of it. One of the first things I learned from “Just My Type” is that although the word ‘font’ is now interchangeable with the words ‘type’ or ‘typeface’, originally a font was “a complete set of letters of a typeface in one particular size and style”. Therefore, Times New Roman Bold and Times New Roman Italic are technically different fonts, but the same typeface.

However strong my personal preferences might be, however, I never really gave a lot of thought to how those various types showed up in the drop-down menu of my word processing program. Little did I know that, until recently, type designers would spend days drafting and re-drafting a single letter, making sure that counters aren’t too wide, the stems aren’t too narrow, and the bowl is well-proportioned. Those typographical terms are all well-defined in the book, so I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

After perfecting the dimensions of each lower and upper case letter, they would be cut out as a stencil, punchcut into steel, and then type molds would be cast, and the molds would be used to create the actual little moveable letter tiles that we all remember from our high school history lesson about Gutenberg. As the letter tiles wore out from being pressed against paper, new tiles would be recast. Creating fonts before the age of computers was the purview of foundries and was quite expensive (suppliers of digital font still call themselves foundries, even though no metal is harmed in the making of any font).

Garfield highlights some of the most ubiquitous fonts in use today, and explains their origins and applications. These stories bring a very human aspect to a subject that most of us take for granted. After a falling-out with his business partner, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson was so concerned about the way his font ‘Doves’ might be used after his death that he spent over 5 months tossing bundles of type into the Thames River in the middle of the night. John Baskerville (Baskerville Old Face) did not achieve great success in his lifetime, despite the admiration of Benjamin Franklin, but his font has been widely used for over 250 years, and can be seen in the official logo of Canada.

Digital font design and distribution has led to an explosion of fonts, with over 2,000 listed in the 55th edition of the “Encyclopaedia of Typefaces”. Fortunately, there are entire web forums – such as the WhatTheFont forum at MyFonts.com – where fellow font fanatics will try to decipher the origins of logos, signs and advertising copy. You could also download their app for your iPhone, although Garfield’s field test of the app’s accuracy was sadly disappointing. You can get an inkling of how many different ways you can design the alphabet by looking at the endpapers of “Just My Type”, where the 100 best fonts of all time are displayed as a periodic table.

If you need to get in the mood to read about fonts, skip ahead to chapter 21, where Garfield excoriates the 8 worst fonts in the world (Comic Sans gets its own chapter at the beginning of the book, along with an explanation of how it has been woefully overused by people wanting their computer-generated documents to look more human). You will either agree heartily with Garfield’s choices or get defensive about seeing your particular choice for party invitations or inter-office memos being targeted. In any case, it will get you fired up about fonts.