Body-text fonts, pt. 21: Plantin

Karin bought a babies’ bilingual board book with pictures of the characters from El Chavo del Ocho.

I read it often to Daniel, four or five times in a row. I read it in Spanish and in English and say all the characters’ names.

Tonight, poor Karin tried to read it to Daniel, and she didn’t know all the names and Daniel threw a fit.

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This early-20th-century typeface is my all-time favorite for body text. A stone-cold classic of hot metal type. Look at that glorious x-height. Excellent for printing on lousy paper (mass-market paperbacks, newspaper, etc.). Beats the pants off Times and its ilk. My favorite letter is the uppercase “R,” and the uppercase “K” has the same badass tail. Kudos to “E,” “M,” “N,” “T,” and “W” also. Weight-wise, I prefer the light/semibold pairing to the regular/bold pairing, at least in the larger sizes.

The text sample, from Jane Eyre, describes why we didn’t go trick-or-treating this Halloween.

It used to be normal for Puffin Classics to be set in Plantin, but lately they’ve been boringly set in Minion.

Sally Rooney; body-text fonts, pt. 6: Garth Graphic

This is another August when I’ll fail to read Light in August. Instead, I’ll finish my second Sally Rooney novel. (No, I haven’t seen the TV episodes, which are reputed to be steamy.) I’m pretty sure Rooney is the youngest novelist I’ve read – the youngest, as in, the most recently born; not as in, the youngest to write a novel. That person is Daisy Ashford.

Rooney is less jaundiced than Ashford was at age nine. But you can sense Rooney inching toward disillusionment. These are her novels’ titles: Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Rooney’s pacing is propulsive. Her scenes are tautly constructed. Her protagonists make me feel like an old fogy: I spend most of the time feeling sorry for them. I suppose that for a lot of her fans, her blank young men and, especially, her aloof young women are personal reference points, imaginary peers for modeling oneself after or for suffering with or for projecting one’s self-conception onto. Some books lend themselves to that sort of thing. Jane Eyre is a fine example, carefully and richly realized though Jane and Rochester are as characters.

As much as I like Jane Eyre, I don’t read that way anymore: I stopped around age thirty-two or thirty-three. Sally Rooney is thirty-one.

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Now, this month’s mini-essay on the typefaces in my books.

One doesn’t often see this font used for setting body text. Which is too bad!

Look at those inconspicuous commas and apostrophes. Look at those very conspicuous, asymmetically serifed, lower-case ys. Look at those interrogation marks, and the big, spiky serifs on the Gs: were I a fly fisherman, this is the font I’d choose.

The Wuthering Heights book club

The brothers (John-Paul and Stephen) are reading Wuthering Heights, one chapter each day. … It’s my second attempt. The book is nowhere near as good as Jane Eyre. Charlotte wrote pleasing sentences; Emily didn’t.

I’m sticking with WH, though, so I can watch the movie by Andrea Arnold. Also, WH deserves credit for inspiring this music video …

… and this cartoon.

Jane Eyre, pt. 3

And so I’ve reached the end of Jane Eyre, which I began reading in January. In March, I remarked upon Mr Rochester’s “marvelous ferocity.” Now here’s someone worth knowing, I thought. But I expected his brutal way of speaking would be tamed by love.

Fortunately I was wrong. Love embraced it:

I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a sharp look-out. It had formerly been my endeavour to study all sides of his character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid.

And so I (JP) was treated to a stimulating ping-pong match: Rochester slamming and spinning with all his force; Jane neutralizing each blow, often with a mere “Yes, sir” or “No, sir”: these artless, artful utterances causing Rochester to stagger. Jane says “Master” and “Sir” to Rochester knowing that she owns him; and when she says “I love you” it’s the freshest sentence in the world.

There are other interesting competitions in the book, not least the one between heavenly and earthly pursuits. But the novel’s greatest achievement is its depiction of two true originals and their delight in one another.

(And yet I worry that outside of fiction, this ping-pong match would be unsustainable. Over time, would sour words continue to excite? Or would they inevitably corrode?)