(I did not find this bit in there, so here it is from my email. It’s a start! There are a few more, all interesting and totally off topic.)
| The Times introduces your favorite (?) typeface, Times New Roman. |
| What font do you write in? People may argue all day on the internet about their favorite typefaces, but it’s a fair wager that the most ubiquitous font of all, whether it’s your personal go-to or not, is Times New Roman. Whence this towering behemoth, you may wonder? It was invented in the 1930s by type designer Stanley Morison, who, after criticizing the London Times for their dated font, was asked to make them a new one. “Morison enlisted the help of draftsman Victor Lardent and began conceptualizing a new typeface with two goals in mind: efficiency—maximizing the amount of type that would fit on a line and thus on a page—and readability,” writes Meredith Mann, Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library. Morison’s new font was taller and narrower, but the letterforms were weighted in a new way that made them easier to read, despite the cramped spacing. (The weighting meant that the font also required more ink, which meant more money—a main reason that the font wasn’t immediately picked up by other papers.) Once the new font was approved, The Times published a pamphlet explaining the switch. “It is evident that there must be changes in typography as long as our social habits are open to variation,” the editors explained. “When it was founded, The Times was largely read in coffee-houses; in the nineteenth century it came to be read in trains; today it is largely read in cars and airliners. Reading habits, dependent on social habits, will not remain constant. Neither must newspaper typography remain constant.” Indeed not, especially when you’ve got such a splashy new font to brag about. “The new [font] will be employed on and after October 3, 1932,” the notice declares. “The Times, for generations the best printed paper, will, by present-day optical standards, be the most comfortably readable journal in the world.” The paper held onto the exclusive rights to Times New Roman for a year, and after that, other publications—once they’d decided it was worth shelling out for—began to follow suit. By now, it’s trickled down into just about everybody’s personal computers and for many, simply become the default. “Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason,” writes Matthew Butterick, author of the impressively niche Typography for Lawyers. “Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.” Why not? “Fame has a dark side,” Butterick writes. “When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, ‘I submitted to the font of least resistance.’ Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.” (Or perhaps you are merely a novelist, who knows that if your paragraph looks good in Times New Roman, it will look good in anything. Too often have we been fooled by the slender affections of Garamond!) By the way, Butterick points out, lawyers should beware: though it’s as much the standard font for them as everyone, the highest court in the land (such as it is) forbids its use. Something to remember for when you get there. |
Woody Guthrie, 1912-1967
Cherokee Chief John Ross
Kim Malthe-Bruun, a 21-year-old Danish resistance fighter. Unfortunately one of the ones who did not make it.
