Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751
I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.
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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:
Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1
Platte County is the outlier.
“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)
Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.
Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.
Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.
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This month’s body-text font is Primer.
This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)
A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.
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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:
Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1
Platte County is the outlier.
“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)
Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.
Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.
Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
This month’s body-text font is Primer.
This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)
A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.