Body-text fonts, pt. 25: Berthold Baskerville

This is useful:

“Irish Names You’re Probably Saying Wrong and How to Pronounce Them” (CNN).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This morning I was lured to a clickbait essay about Microsoft Office’s new default font, Aptos. The thesis: Aptos isn’t bad. The argument: (1) Aptos is wider than Calibri, and (2) the “l” has a curved bottom.

Gratuitous insults were hurled at Papyrus and Comic Sans.

The author, a breezy ignoramus, deserves no greater remuneration for this “analysis” than the cost of one McDonald’s double-cheeseburger.

I’d like to think that my own amateurish font discussions are better. But they, too, probably scrape the depths of witlessness. So I apologize.

Not all amateurs are hacks. John Baskerville was no seasoned pro in 1757 when he printed a book with his new typeface. The work was so good, Cambridge University commissioned more printing by him.

Alas, rival printers denigrated him, and he charged high fees, so his designs fell into disuse. But in the twentieth century, they became ubiquitous. Many variations were developed.

Here is a sample of Güntar Gerhard Lange’s 1961 version for the Berthold company.

The top-heavy “C” distinguishes Berthold’s from other “Baskervilles,” as does the less conspicuous “R” with its beautiful, flowing tail (compare with this later “Baskerville” by Lange).

See also Lange’s version of Garamond, discussed previously as URW Garamond (it was issued first by Berthold).

P.S. The above passage is from Lois Duncan’s Stranger with My Face, the creepiest young-adult novel I’ve read. One could do worse than to work through Duncan’s oeuvre. Beware, Hachette editions from the 2010s have been modernized; the protagonists use e-devices. Not cool.

Umbrella; vermin; children; Heineken

Rihanna: “ … under my um-bar-
ella, -ella, -ella,
eh, eh.”

Samuel: “Hahahahahahahahahaha.”

A timely song, what with all the drizzle. Summer appears to be winding down. We’ve had our first notable cooling, and leaves have been peppering the ground. This is a “false fall”; but tell that to the mice, who’ve again infiltrated our mud-room: we’ve found little mounds of dirt where they’ve been tunneling. We’ve left no food for them. They must simply be sheltering from the cold.

Daniel, who seems constitutionally squirmier than Samuel (and he is plenty squirmy), has been hurtling himself out of his chair and slithering over the ground, either backwards until he gets stuck or, like a hurricane, in a spiral pattern. He leaves little spiral-paths of puke. Or he stays in his chair and rocks his legs so vigorously that it lurches, a foot at a time, across the room.

Samuel leaves out uncapped dry-erase markers, and Daniel sucks them.

I’m gradually weaning the children off YouTube, to interest them in soccer (which will be necessary for them when the World Cup is played). It helps that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, ViX broadcasts Champions League matches. Samuel is familiar with the halftime commercials. “Drink responsibly,” he says when he hears strains of Handel, who composed the Champions League refrain.

December’s poem

The Omicron COVID variant has hit Cornell hard, CNN reports. Many of the infected persons are fully vaccinated. A good number have been given booster shots.

The latest figures are here. They are worth beholding.

I’d bet that most of us, at some time or another, will get infected with Omicron or something worse.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Here is the latest video of Un mundo inmenso. It’s about the hipster despot of El Salvador, the one who made Bitcoin a national currency.

I always knew hipsterdom would get out of hand. I just didn’t expect El Salvador to lead the way.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This poem is by William Blake.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Is this a holy thing to see,

In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduc’d to misery,

Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?

And so many children poor?

It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine.

And their fields are bleak & bare.

And their ways are fill’d with thorns.

It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine,

And where-e’er the rain does fall:

Babe can never hunger there,

Nor poverty the mind appall.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Meanwhile, in Ecuador …

On Sunday, Ecuadorians voted.

Andrés Arauz is the candidate of the correístas, the followers of that notorious ex-president, Rafael Correa. Arauz received the most votes of all the candidates, but not enough to win outright. A runoff election on April 11 will determine who becomes the new president.

Arauz’s opponent – Sunday’s runner-up – is TBD.

There are two contenders. One is Yaku Pérez, of Pachakutik (the indigenist party). The other is the 2017 runner-up, the banker Guillermo Lasso, who trails Pérez by less than one percentage point.

(Only the top two vote-getters will qualify for the next round. The rules are explained here.)

El Universo’s map of results shows the election playing out along ethnic lines. Pérez leads in virtually every province that has a large percentage of indigenous voters. Elsewhere, Arauz leads. Lasso is ahead only in Pichincha (the capital) and in sparsely populated Galápagos.

(Votes, not provinces, are what matter. Looking at provinces just helps us to understand regional and demographic trends.)

My hunch is that if Lasso were edged out, his supporters wouldn’t turn to Pérez in large enough numbers for Pérez to surge past Arauz in the next round (though Lasso himself would endorse Pérez over Arauz). Similarly, should Pérez fail to qualify for the runoff, his voters wouldn’t likely favor Lasso enough for Arauz to be defeated.

I have left thirty percent of the voters unaccounted for: those who didn’t choose any of the top three candidates. There is reason to think that those favoring Xavier Hervas, the next highest vote-getter, would migrate to Pérez (Hervas’s fellow lefty). Even so, I believe that Arauz will win in the second round.

I’m not at all optimistic about the correístas’ ability to govern. In the past, they have practiced gross patronage. Their economic strategy has been to take oil from indigenous peoples’ lands in order to pay for handouts and public works (and white elephants).

Anti-correístas, though, are in the curious position of having to promote aspects of both the free-market agenda (Lasso’s) and the ecologically-minded, “plurinationalist” agenda (Pérez’s) over that of Arauz, who is arguably the centrist among the three candidates. This is because any joint effort to defeat the correístas will have to bring opposite sides together.

Meanwhile, the international press seems not to have as much to say as in 2017. My mother did send this rather bizarre story from The Guardian detailing the connections between a smear campaign, birdsong, and Colombian guerrilleros. And this report from CNN gives a sense of the appeal of Pérez, the election’s dark horse.