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
From my youth up I never liked the city.
I never forgot the mountains where I was born.
The world caught me and harnessed me
And drove me through dust, thirty years away from home.
Migratory birds return to the same tree.
Fish find their way back to the pools where they were hatched.
I have been over the whole country,
And I have come back at last to the garden of my childhood.
My farm is only ten acres.
The farm house has eight or nine rooms.
Elms and willows shade the back garden.
Peach trees stand by the front door.
The village is out of sight.
You can hear dogs bark in the alleys,
And cocks crow in the mulberry trees.
When you come through the gate into the court
You will find no dust or mess.
Peace and quiet live in every room.
I am content to stay here the rest of my life.
At last I have found myself.
— Tao Yuan Ming (Tao Qian) Chinese, 365-427
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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.