Body-text fonts, pt. 11: Vendome
His departure is old news, but I’d like to record my gratitude to the Argentinian Gustavo Alfaro, Ecuador’s manager during this last World Cup cycle. He is an astute tactician and a careful mentor to young professionals. By many accounts, he is a good person.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
This month I exhibit a bizarre typeface. As body text it appears in just one of my volumes, a Random House Value Publishing omnibus of E.M. Forster’s novels (obtained last weekend at Goodwill).
The italics are severely slanted.
That is how they were designed to look.
[Update, 27 January: I now believe that this isn’t a sample of true italics. Here is a website where you can buy cheap font files of Vendome. Images of body text are provided. Roman text looks like this; the italics look like this. You can see that these italic characters aren’t just slanted versions of the roman ones. They have different shapes. Compare the roman and italic uppercase “A,” as well as the roman and italic lowercase “b”: the roman characters have more serifs. And in the italic lowercase “g,” the lower and upper storeys are farther apart than in the roman “g.” On the other hand, all these differences are absent from the text sample taken from the Forster omnibus.
Of course, not every genuine Vendome will look exactly like Fontsite’s Vendome.]
Karin didn’t bother with the typeface. Instead, she listened to a recording of A Room with a View. Cecil Vyse and Cousin Charlotte irked her equally.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Daniel sleeps; I type.
He often goes to bed like this. I put on soothing Italian soundtrack music and lie with him. He rolls around and jumps up and down on me, doing considerable violence; and then, declining suddenly, he “gives up the ghost.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
This month I exhibit a bizarre typeface. As body text it appears in just one of my volumes, a Random House Value Publishing omnibus of E.M. Forster’s novels (obtained last weekend at Goodwill).
The italics are severely slanted.
That is how they were designed to look.
[Update, 27 January: I now believe that this isn’t a sample of true italics. Here is a website where you can buy cheap font files of Vendome. Images of body text are provided. Roman text looks like this; the italics look like this. You can see that these italic characters aren’t just slanted versions of the roman ones. They have different shapes. Compare the roman and italic uppercase “A,” as well as the roman and italic lowercase “b”: the roman characters have more serifs. And in the italic lowercase “g,” the lower and upper storeys are farther apart than in the roman “g.” On the other hand, all these differences are absent from the text sample taken from the Forster omnibus.
Of course, not every genuine Vendome will look exactly like Fontsite’s Vendome.]
Karin didn’t bother with the typeface. Instead, she listened to a recording of A Room with a View. Cecil Vyse and Cousin Charlotte irked her equally.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Daniel sleeps; I type.
He often goes to bed like this. I put on soothing Italian soundtrack music and lie with him. He rolls around and jumps up and down on me, doing considerable violence; and then, declining suddenly, he “gives up the ghost.”