Ecuador 0, Colombia 0; body-text fonts, pt. 20: Wessex

Our shaky goalkeeper, Moisés Ramírez, blocked a penalty kick by Colombia’s Luis Díaz. Good for Moisés! The much-criticized Kevin Rodríguez also played well. The team, as a whole, did not.

We need a different coach.

Other teams are bad enough, we might scrape through to the World Cup. But we’re nothing like pleasing to watch. (Again, I mean the team; some of our individuals are amazing to behold.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This is from the introduction to the Library of America’s paperback edition of Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946), which I haven’t read but might do (fall isn’t only a good season for reading horror and murder; it also befits the campus novel).

I did recently stare at the typeface for several hours, in Dolores Hitchens’s Sleep with Strangers.

It’s a rare one.
This book is set in 12 point Wessex, conceived by Matthew Butterick and finished at Boston’s Font Bureau in 1993. The typeface was inspired by the “surprising beauty of the wide-bodied italic complement of Caledonia … ”
The typeface reminds me of W.A. Dwiggins’s work more generally (e.g., Electra, New Caledonia, New Winchester).

Butterick, a lawyer and type designer, maintains a website that is perhaps the best free guide for amateur typesetters – that is, for virtually all of us. I say free, although Butterick (reasonably) would like people to give him money or else buy his book or one of his fonts. Wessex, however, doesn’t appear to be for sale; and I’m not sure that if it were, the proceeds would go to Butterick.