Because I like fonts. Okay?
The Font
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Comments on this entry are closed.
I was liking on cooper black before hardly anybody knew what it was. In the 80’s I had pre-printed sheets (24″x36″ & 30″x42″) of Crystalene vellum and double matte mylar professionally printed with the company titleblocks and borders and cooper black was the font used for the primary lettering. The same with done with all the company paper products, invoices, envelopes, etc. When I transitioned to CAD in the late 90’s so did the lettering style, to Graphite because cooper black was looking too bulky. 20+ years later I am still using Graphite. Maybe it’s time for another change….
I have discovered new realms of joy with the fountain pen with a flex nib and a modified Spencerian script. But sometimes it’s La Ronde or Palmer Business hand. Bliss. The gods of the copybook headings must be smiling on me.
Cooper Black is a comforting blowback to the 80s…nice for headlines but please bring back a nice Souvenir Medium for copy. Like a fine wine. No one uses it anymore.
My career in doing graphic design bridged the Letraset/computer based medium. I started working by hand using various methods of applying text and led the process of moving my company over to computer based design environment. The hardware back then was in today’s terms, primitive, but managed to get the job done. Now, everything is computer based and we have access to thousands of fonts. Even so, there is a enduring quality to fonts like Cooper Bold that has not faded with time.
I do too.
I actually ran a linotype machine for a while 30 years ago, probably 30 years after their time. I am still enamored by those machines.
All mechanical! An arm would come down and grab the just used line of letters and punctuation (called matrices) and carry it up to the top of the machine. A rod would push the used matrices hanging over the canister (magazine) where a binary code would sort the recycled letters dropping them into the proper slot to be reused again and again automatically!
The ETAOIN SHURDLU keyboard arranged so the most common letters were all together was amazing. Just push a button and that matrix (letter or punctuation) would slide down a chute and take its place as the next letter in the line. Then there were the proportional spacing spaces that grew to fill up the line as needed. When you finished typing a line, every letter was in order forming a mold for that line of type. You pulled a lever and molten metal was pumped into the line filling every letter to form a line for printing.
If you didn’t put enough proportional spaces to fill up the line, then metal would squirt between a few letters and make a mess of things. But if the line was done right, the metal, just cool enough to be solid now, fell into a tray atop the previous line you made. The arm came down to take the spent letters back up to the top to be reused. Fascinating!
You could clearly see everything that was happening but it was still like magic. If there was a mistake in a line, you just pulled that line, a strip of metal, out of the group, and tossed it into the pot where it would melt and be reused. Then you just retyped the line to fix the mistake. I once tossed a line into the pot and it splashed a bit. A drop flew up and hit me in the eye, right at the tear duct. Didn’t do any damage, but I hate to think what would have happened if it had landed a quarter-inch to the left.
Excellent post, BroKen. And then there was the smell off the linotype. Machine oil and molten metal.
BroKen’s comment embodies one of the reasons for my nom-de-cyberspace. I miss analogue technology because most people could, after some quite straightforward, often quite elementary training, understand and apply it, and because analogue technology provided millions of jobs at which people found they made a useful contribution they could be proud of, and at which they earned a living wage with which they could afford the American Dream for themselves and their families.