Body-text fonts, pt. 17: Robert Slimbach’s fonts: Adobe Garamond, Minion, and, especially, ITC Slimbach

We live during Robert Slimbach’s benevolent reign, or Adobe’s. It’s stale. Good as Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond and Minion have been, it’s tedious to see them still used so often.

Slimbach has created other fine typefaces for Adobe – Adobe Ten Oldstyle, Adobe Text (see Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government), etc. – but, for whatever reason, book designers haven’t warmed to them. Arno and Warnock are good, too, but only on certain days of the week.

What I really like by Slimbach is his early, Zapf-inspired eponymous font for ITC. I first noticed it in NIV Study Bibles from the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s also in Bruce Cumings’s history, Korea’s Place in the Sun, and in the anthology Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century; lately, it’s been shared all over the Internet in the body text of Ross McCammon’s book, Works Well with Others: An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You.

(I seldom read self-help books. But I read all of this one. It’s painless, and it gives tips about how and when to write curt emails and use curse words and drink after the job and on the job, and how to tell your dining partner you’re not going to drink if you aren’t going to. And how to pronounce the names of alcoholic drinks from Scotland. It’s a very pro-drink book. The author’s dissimulations to the contrary, it’s the douchiest self-help book I’ve read. [I know, there are much worse ones.] After I finished the book, I looked up some of McCammon’s Esquire articles, and wow, that was like landing on a different planet. I shut the computer and fled the room. … By the way, I learned from At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig [Adobe Garamond] that the country that imports by far the most Scotch, or that used to, is tariff-free Paraguay; the booze is then smuggled into Argentina and Brazil.)

As for Minion itself, I like it – but not tiny, and not in lines of interminable length, which is how Oxford University Press uses it.

Wanna see Minion used well? Look at a Vintage paperback of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Elizabeth Anderson

The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson is the subject of two recent articles in The New Yorker.

The newer article, published this week, surveys her career and personality.

The older one, published in September, reviews her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), which is built around her 2015 Tanner Lectures.

In all the time I was at Cornell, Anderson gave what I thought was the best talk by a visiting speaker. Its content was incorporated into her book The Imperative of Integration.

Her best-known article is “What Is the Point of Equality?”; her first book, Value in Ethics and Economics, is much cited.

I’ve never had occasion to assign her political writings in my classes. But I did assign her 2007 article “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” in a class that I taught on the philosophy of religion. (This article is one of the best in the celebrated anthology Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life; it also appears in Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist. Anderson’s colleague at the University of Michigan, Edwin Curley, presents a similar argument in a fascinating exchange with Peter van Inwagen, in the anthology Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham.)

I’m glad to see Anderson’s work noticed in the popular press. Her recent writings, especially, are very easy to understand. And her arguments tend to be motivated by lived experience rather than by esoteric considerations. I sometimes wonder how this or that view of hers, not widely held nor even previously articulated, could ever have failed to be among the top contenders in popular debate.