Body-text fonts, pt. 41: Aldus

If you’re an Irish novelist publishing a masterpiece, c. 2017–2018, chances are, it’ll be typeset with Hermann Zapf’s Aldus.

Exhibit A (Sally Rooney):

Exhibit B (Anna Burns):

Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Dublin, Aberdeen, and Shetland (where Edoarda took grant-funded knitting lessons). I told Stephen I wanted a tree from Shetland; failing that, a jar of jellied eels, although that’s more of a Londoners’ food; failing that, a tabloid. Stephen found no trees, eels, or tabloids on Shetland. He did bring the July 4 issue of the Shetland Times. Front-page news: “Ponies Draw Crowds from Afar”; “Council Spends £2.4m on Agency Staff for Ferries.” The body text (Miller) is the smallest I’ve seen in any newspaper.

Closing credits

This year, I read at least two books by each of these authors:

• Henning Mankell (Faceless Killers; The Dogs of Riga)
• Joe Queenan (One for the Books; Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon)
• Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You)
• Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis 1 and 2)
• Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; Pop. 1280)
• Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes; Mr. Fortune’s Maggot)

A few of these books, I’m still working on, but I’ll’ve finished them by January 1.

Also, I enjoyed these authors:

• H. W. Brands (I finished Dreams of El Dorado)
• Ben Macintyre (I finished The Spy and the Traitor)

They both write popular histories/biographies. I can’t commend them enough: almost every page is rewarding.

I’m not including such deserving authors as Beatrix Potter and Margaret Wise Brown. Not because I didn’t read enough of their books or because those books are for children or are too short, but because I didn’t read them for my own sake. I also read lots of Mother Goose.

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Rooney’s Conversations with Friends may have been my favorite read of the year. That, or Roughing It, which is hilarious but doesn’t have the same narrative urgency as Conversations with Friends, even though some chapters of Roughing It are life-or-death. (Being a coming-of-age tale, Conversations only feels like it is life-or-death.) The lesson of Roughing It is this. The people of the United States are compulsive liars; also, they love to believe lies. It becomes less strange, upon reading Twain, that Donald Trump should have been elected President. The predilection for outlandish untruth has been around for a long time. Twain lampoons the lying while himself resorting to embellishment. I suppose that as a satirist, that is his right.

Chapter I of Pudd’nhead Wilson has this epigraph: “Tell the truth or trump – but get the trick.”

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Otherwise, this hasn’t been a year for getting through the classics. I did finish reading the Purgatorio. I am eager to read the Paradiso so that I can move on to the Decameron, which I became perversely eager for after I saw The Little Hours.

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On to the domestic front. I obtained a new stepfather-in-law. A nephew and a niece were born to me. My son Daniel was born in February. He’s now been outside his mother longer than he was inside her (unless each of us, in his or her earliest stage of development, is a pre-fertilized egg). For a couple of months Daniel seemed not to have a personality. Now he is an enterprising, zestful, strong-willed young man. Samuel likes him but constantly knocks him down or pushes him away, usually due to some property dispute. Daniel has learned to push back. I’m disturbed and pleased. Every night, I pray for my sons to love each other and get along; but I also want them to fight for the good, and being able to fight for the good entails being able to fight.

Ziva is the same as always: desirous of being stroked, she wakes me in the night. Jasper seemed ill – he lost many lbs. – but today the veterinarian confirmed that it’s because of the dieting we’ve been forcing him to do (he’s at his ideal weight for the first time since he took to stealing Ziva’s kitten food). Karin & I have continued our march through British TV. This has been the year of the Hobbit-like actor Ken Stott, who appears in the police procedurals Crime and, with Caroline Catz, The Vice; and of Catz’s sadly truncated Murder in Suburbia, in which two unmarried, lovelorn policewomen investigate crimes by “Karens” (“Grangerites,” in South Bend parlance). So, nothing too profound.

Of course, we all watched the World Cup.

We also explored our new neighborhood. I regularly visited the local library branch. I’d check out books and print out journal articles (up to 33 B&W pp./day, gratis). This library branch has a reputation for patron misbehavior – I learned this when I interviewed for a job there a few years ago – but I haven’t observed a single episode. This really is a tranquil part of town in which to live.

A mighty dump truck; Sally Rooney, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 8: Photina

Happy birthday, tomorrow, to Samuel. He’s about to turn three years old – a sufficiently sophisticated age for eager gift-getting. Tonight he opened a gift that was too large for Karin & me to hide: a Tonka “mighty dump trunk.” What enjoyment he is obtaining from this heap of cold metal!

Daniel, meanwhile, happily plays with the truck’s empty cardboard box. He turned eight months old today.

Samuel has been taken to a corn maze and to various trunk-or-treats. Exhausting events, trunk-or-treats. Last night, we attended one at our church, saw how many cars were in the parking lot, and didn’t even try to join in. The event was good publicity for the church, though.

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I finished reading Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. It’s the best of her three novels. Frankly, I was amazed. Her characters are good at talking but bad at living. Do they make any progress? That’s debatable. Frances, the narrator, a precocious university student – and homewrecker, and bad friend – takes a religious turn. Unfashionably, she reads the gospels; even less fashionably, near the end of the book, she goes to church; less fashionably still, she begins to pray. Well and good; this is what ought to come of hitting rock-bottom. Then the novel ends with a gut-punch comparable to that of Wilfred Owen’s “Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” At least, that’s how it felt to me; other readers will feel differently. The characters and, I suspect, many of Rooney’s readers are enthusiastic moralizers who basically just do what they want to do.

Rooney is famous, notorious even, for being a well-to-do bourgeois Marxist, and so this month’s body-text font, Photina, which looks good on cheap paper, is featured in a passage about Marx from a reference book’s analytical table of contents.

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.