Type faces dominate our lives, subtly or not so subtly attracting us to everything from underarm deodorants to fast food joints to record album covers, while type faces on signage get us to our destinations without getting lost. And in this age of personal computers and their myriad fonts, type faces dominate our lives as never before, enabling us to be our own graphic artists. How else to explain those kitschy party invitations we all get?
I should make it clear from the jump that I am a font wonk, one of those annoying people who obsesses over type faces, as well as have font fiend friends who named their dog Bodoni. I can trace this affliction/addiction to my early years in the newspaper business when I would stand in the composing room on one side of a turtle (a moveable steel table) while a compositor would assemble a newspaper page from mirror-image hot metal linotype type that would become a readable work of art as the page came off the presses.
I love some fonts — Garamond, Tempus Sans ITC, Gill Sans (but not the somewhat similar and ubiquitous Arial) and Papyrus, used by James Cameron throughout Avatar — while sneering at others — Comic Sans and the crapoid WordPress for The Moderate Voice headlines and body type to name but two. I’m a sucker for ampersands (a conflation of the Latin et, the more elaborate ones seemingly creature-like, and enjoyed a font feast nonpariel while staying at a friend’s flat in New York’s East Village last Christmas holiday and wandering the streets ogling store signs.
This brings me to Simon Garfield’s just published Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, a quick, quirky, elucidating, pun drenched and often hilarious read that several reviewers have already noted will do for fonts what Lynne Truss’s runaway 2004 bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves did for punctuation.