“A monument of misplaced scholarship”

… is how a Guardian reviewer describes a new edition of the diaries of Cambridge don and “Pomp and Circumstance”/​“Land of Hope and Glory” lyricist A. C. Benson (1862–1925).

Having previewed the book on Amazon, I concur.

See, for instance, p. 267, n. 4 (the font is Fournier).

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Samuel will return to school this week. Tonight, he realized that he’ll go to school from August until June every year for the foreseeable future.

I told him I went to school for twenty-four years.

He can count much higher than twenty-four, and he can do other mathematical operations – he and Daniel made extraordinary progress this summer (his teacher will be shocked) – but, clearly, the concept of twenty-four years is beyond his reach.

The concept of an hour is barely within it.

He has the concept of living forever. He’s all for it. Like Wilbur the pig, he doesn’t want to die.

Bedtime music, pt. 153; body-text fonts, pt. 13: Goudy Old Style

Samuel has been asking to listen to Michael Stearns on Spotify, in the basement, late at night.

He curls up in an armchair, wraps himself in a blanket, and goes to sleep.

It’s cute, but he is becoming a quite heavy sack of potatoes. I’d rather not make a habit of carrying him up the stairs to his bed.

Tonight, both children are extremely wild and violent.

Meanwhile, in Florida …

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This is Goudy, one of the “diamond-dot” fonts (look at the semicolons, colons, periods, etc. – well, maybe you can’t tell from this screenshot).

It’s especially useful in tight spaces, e.g. in narrow columns or where there is little distance between successive lines of text. Harper’s Magazine, which has been set in Goudy for many years, has got the best-looking body text of the famous magazines, better-looking even than The New Yorker’s.

A free variant, available in the roman and italic styles – but not in boldface – is Sorts Mill Goudy.