fonts | Chris Aldrich

📖 Read pages 89-142 of Just My Type by Simon Garfield

📖 Read pages 89-142 of Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by Simon Garfield

The flowery language continues apace almost as if this were a love letter to the typographic arts.

There is seemingly no solid narrative thrust throughout the book, which easily makes it something that one can read a chapter or two of every day. One needn’t swim along linearly, but could dip in to sections here and there without much loss based on my reading thus far.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Chapters 6-9

Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography, published by CUP in 1907, was printed in Caslon.

Highlight (yellow) – 6. Baskerville is Dead > Page 103

This is just painful to read, particularly as in the sentence before it was noted that Baskerville’s original punches and matrices are housed at the Cambridge University Press. Oh, the horror! It’s one thing if you’re Vincent Connare, but Baskerville?!
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 evening

Highlight (yellow) – 8. Tunnel Visions > Page 109

I did quite like the section on Johnston Sans which I hadn’t previously known any history about.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 evening

In 1916, the same year that Johnston’s work appeared, Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant published their exhaustive study of the optical adjustments that were required of a typeface to aid readability and achieve visually balanced characters (this was the study that observed that a lower-case t often has to lean backwards, and the dot over the i has to be offset a little to the left.)

Highlight (green) – 8. Tunnel Visions > Page 119

I’m curious to read more about the scientific research of perceptions in this areas, particularly if they’ve been updated in the last century.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 evening

Guide to highlight colors

Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through