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Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):


Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:


If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins over to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next, and so on.
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Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators: For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current reading (books):
  • W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
  • Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
  • Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
  • E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
  • C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
  • François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
  • John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
  • Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
  • John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
  • Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
  • books mentioned previously, as yet unfinished
I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

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A long-awaited stroll; a latitude, hydrological divides, and other fancies

Snow: mostly melted. Temperatures: in the fifties (F); sixties tomorrow. I take Abel and Daniel strolling. Daniel jumps in all the puddles. He soaks the insides of his boots. I don’t know what he’ll wear if we go out again very soon.

Abel, in the stroller, leans forward, his head as near to the ground as he can get it, as if he were peering into tidal pools.

I halt to check if he’s all right; Daniel races ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fun fact I just learned: Canada’s lowest latitude passes through South Bend just a few blocks north of Toad Hall.


(Toad Hall is our house.)

I could pinpoint the location, stroll there, and hop back and forth over the line. “Now I’m south of all of Canada. Now I’m north of a little of Canada.”

I suppose the urge is due to having grown up near the equator.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I could do this with the nearby drainage divide, too. “Now I’m daining into the Great Lakes. Now I’m draining into the Gulf of Mexico, I mean the Gulf of America.”

It seems a less arbitrary line since it has a basis in physical rather than political reality – until I remember that the Great Lakes drain into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the Atlantic, which encompasses the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, America). So that, ultimately, the distinction between these drainage basins is artificial.

Of course there’s a physical difference between draining one way and draining the other, but if you mark all such differences you end up with insignificant, postage stamp-sized drainage basins.

Artifice – human purposiveness – seems inescapable if much geography is to be done at all.

I remember checking out geography Ph.D. programs when I was very young. There was the respectable but daunting meteorology specialization; all else seemed postmodern free-for-all. A bitter disappointment to someone who’d vaguely entertained the thought that his vocation might consist of memorizing picturesque but unimpeachable facts, e.g. that Czechoslovakia’s capital is Prague.
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Valentine’s

Abel has cabin fever now. He points at the stroller, squawks, climbs onto my chest, and beats it. Soon, Abel, soon.

Like his brothers before him, he attacks my face and snatches at my glasses when I put them on at night. His little nails must have cut inside my eyelid. When I fold it back I find the scab. It has been chafing my eyeball.

Happy Valentine’s (this time, on the day itself). No celebration for Karin & me tonight. We’ll go out later this week.

I did put on Sleepless in Seattle for the family. There aren’t a lot of Valentine’s Day movies. I’ve seen these others:

My Bloody Valentine and the excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock – two for the horror aisle;

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;

and:

Some Like It Hot.

Irrespective of overall merit or demerit, only Sleepless preserves the spirit of, and does justice to, the holiday. (I’ve not seen An Affair to Remember.)

Happy birthday to my long-dead Great Grandad Valentine, my father’s mother’s father.
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February’s poem

Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

Massive Attack, “One Love”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
It’s you I love
And not another
And I know our love
Will last forever
You I love
And not another
And I know we’ll always
Be together
Some men have one love
Two and three love
Four and five
And six love
But I believe
In one love
I believe
In one love

Some men don’t feel secure
Unless they have a woman on each arm
They have to play the field
Prove they have charm
They say, Don’t lay your eggs in one basket
If the basket should fall, all your eggs’ll be broken
But I believe
In one love
I believe
In one love
Oh girl
I believe
In one love
I believe
In one love
Oh girl

It’s not the everyday you find the woman of your dreams
Who will always be there – no matter how bad things seems
Ever so faithful
Ever so sure
No man could ever
Ax for more
I believe
In one love
I believe
In one love
Oh girl
I believe
In one love …

I believe …
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯


Vocalist: Horace Andy.
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