Body-text fonts, pt. 51: De Vinne

Our ten-year anniversary festivities continue. On the day itself – Thursday – we took Daniel and Abel to the beach; Samuel was in school, but Karin’s mom joined us. Then, today, Karin & I left all three children with Karin’s dad and traveled to Niles. We watched The Sheep Detectives and ate cheap hot dogs at the cinema, strolled through the park, bought books and fancy candy, and dined on pizza. It was very “us.”

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Penguin typeset a 1988 edition of The Virginian (1902) in De Vinne, a font from the late nineteenth century …

… only to re-set and reissue the book in Stempel Garamond, a little later. I guess the initial nod to quaintness was regretted.

Time was, this book was taught in schools.

Body-text fonts, pt. 50: Baskerville (metal type, mid-20th c.); Baskerville 10 (digitization)

My favorite Baskerville specimens from the previous century are in Charles Williams’s novels (e.g., War in Heaven [1930]).

This, too, is representative:

Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

From the 2003 NYRB Classics introduction by Jan Morris:

There was a time when the opening line of this book entered the common parlance of educated English and American people. Nearly everyone I knew could quote it, and “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot” became a commonplace of badinage or social pleasantry. The line still gets into dictionaries of quotations, but it is years since I have heard it used in conversation.

It’s too bad that we’ve moved from the gracious “Take my camel, dear” to the boorish “Hold my beer.”

(František Štorm’s Baskerville 10 is the font’s closest digital approximation.)

Body-text fonts, pt. 49: ITC Garamond

The Iranians are trying to have their World Cup games moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

Good. Luck.

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Six-year-old Samuel, whom we don’t allow to use social media, has been talking about giving up social media for a week. 🙄

Not for Lent’s sake. For a Klondike bar. (“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”)

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Chubby ITC Garamond is this month’s typeface. (This link is to the darker version, and this link is to the lighter version.)

My children are less “Charlie Bucket,” more “Mike Teavee.”

Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):

Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:

If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

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Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins over to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next one, and so on.

Body-text fonts, pt. 47: Agmena

The group has been reading Being Mortal: Medicine and What Happens in the End – hardly the last word on dying, but a good starting-point for preparing for one’s own death and thinking how to help those whose turn it is to die.

The best thing about reading this book – and I mean this as a sincere compliment, not in any backhanded way – was that it prompted me to finally read “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”

It, it, it … the passage is like that horror flick – that great mortality parable – It Follows.

The typeface sampled above is Jovica Veljovič’s Agmena. Tolstoy’s story serves as the epilogue of the anthology Leading Lives that Matter.

Body-text fonts, pt. 46: Albertina

This’ll rankle people: “2026 World Cup ‘Pride Match’ to Feature Egypt and Iran” (BBC).

A 2026 World Cup fixture designated by organisers as an LGBTQ+ “Pride Match” will feature two countries where homosexuality is illegal. …

The plans were put in place before the teams involved in the fixture were selected or the draw for the 2026 World Cup was made.

The moral of this story is … [I leave it as an exercise for the reader].

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Re: the font.

In a not-too-wild alternate reality, universities decline less severely, and I obtain gainful employment. I teach classes and publish ten-page articles: some, in top journals; others, in Curaçaoan semi-annuals. Each article is repeatedly anthologized.

In time, I issue a pithy book. Then another. Then a third and a fourth. (I write bestselling mysteries on the side.)

I’m respected enough that it doesn’t matter with whom I publish the fourth academic book. Perhaps I choose Indiana, out of loyalty to the state; perhaps, a trade press (Norton? Penguin?). Perhaps I self-publish and do all the typesetting myself.

The first book, I publish in the “Cambridge Studies in Philosophy” series; the third, a dauntingly terse work, with “Princeton Monographs in Philosophy.”

What interests me tonight is the second book, issued, obligatorily, with Oxford. (“Obligatorily” because Oxford has just about cornered the market of the best academic books. The alternate reality isn’t so different that the major players have changed.)

The trouble with Oxford, as a publisher, is its meager font menu and tiny print size.

My Oxford font choice is Albertina for its long-tailed lowercase “y.”

(This specimen is from Barry Cunliffe’s By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia, a lovely book that I got from the exchanging-box outside my library, for free.)

Body-text fonts, pt. 45: New Caledonia

In this month’s font’s sample, Robert Graves discusses memoir-writing:

It’s the line about people reading about food and drink that gets me. I’ve noticed, perusing Madame’s excellent blog, that my pulse quickens at the gastronomic bits.

C. S. Lewis:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

As a teenager, I used to find this passage in Mere Christianity very funny; twenty-five years later, looking at pictures of food is precisely what half the world does.

(Madame, understand, I’m not criticizing your food photos. There’s obscenity, and there’s art. Your photos are on the respectable half of the divide.)

Madame has a second blog – a Substack where she posts excerpts of her memoirs. A word of advice, Madame. Put in all you can about food and drink, and murders, and ghosts or spirits, and the Prince of Wales (not unmanageable for a Canadian) … and tidbits about your children, whom I knew in high school. (I liked the detail about giving birth one room over from the woman who kept screaming, Que me haga cesaria.) My parents dredged up an old chestnut about me just last night. My mom led a Bible study at a church in Esmeraldas. She entrusted me to some youths who lost track of me. Neighbors found me outside the church. Most of my body had been buried in a mudslide. (This was during the Niño of 1982.) I’d heard this story before, except for the detail about my having been submerged in mud. (I thought I’d just gotten dirty.) Bear in mind, this was a Downtown Esmeraldas mudslide, so it would have contained garbage, sewage, etc. And I could have drowned. We’re always just on the other side of death; that fact is more obvious in some places than in others. Robert Graves’s tone may sound frivolous, but it’s a sweetener; his subject is the First World War.

Body-text fonts, pt. 44: the Fell types

Abel now climbs stairs.

Too, too soon.

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Samuel has thought up a new Agatha Christie novel: Bossy (!).

“It’s about one man who kills another man in the Olden Days.”

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These fonts are available, gratis, from Google:

IM Fell Double Pica

IM Fell DW Pica

IM Fell English

IM Fell French Canon

IM Fell Great Primer

They’re digitizations, by Igino Marini, of types “bequeathed to the University of Oxford by John Fell in 1686.”

The fonts aren’t especially alike, nor do they work equally well for typesetting just any content. One must use them very judiciously. Their attraction is that they’re VENERABLE-LOOKING and ROUGH.

(DISTRESSED is another word that comes to mind, as in: “distressed blue jeans.”)

Even so, the fonts, when properly sized and spaced, are very legible.

Whenever I see them – or their doppelgängers (more on one doppelgänger in a moment) – it’s in some pretentious children’s book, e.g. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin.

(The story is charming; the pretentiousness is due to the number of pages.)

(Spurge, an elfin emissary to the goblin capital – and a spy – is hosted by a goblin scholar, Werfel, who tries his darnednest to be hospitable but can’t help committing faux pas.)

The font in this sample is actually a commercial font that looks like IM Fell Great Primer. It’s surprisingly OK as body text, isn’t it?

Just don’t go hog wild and use Fell fonts in all your documents.

Body-text fonts, pt. 43: Spectral

Last week: Paraguay 0, Ecuador 0.

Tonight: Ecuador 1, Argentina 0.

We concluded South America’s World Cup qualification tournament with:

• qualification
• a victory over the World Cup champions
• a final position as runners-up (trailing only the aforementioned champions)
• a total of five goals conceded in eighteen games – the joint-lowest total in the tournament’s history
• a streak of five “clean sheets” (games with no goals conceded)
• a streak of eleven undefeated games

I think it was after the goalless draw in Uruguay, with eight games to play, that I predicted we wouldn’t lose again.

The bad news is that tonight, Moisés Caicedo received two yellow cards and was ejected. The second yellow card was extremely doubtful. The referee, who’d been obliged to eject an Argentinian, seemed to be trying to even up the numbers.

I’m sure we’ll appeal to CONMEBOL. Let’s pray that no suspension is enforced.

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Having recovered from injury and illness, I mowed the shin-high backyard grass. It was slow going, but painless … until, some hours afterward, my hip and ankle began to trouble me.

Then, today, I threw out my back.

Either I get sidelined due to a foot puncture – or sinusitus – and suffer; or I recover, then mow, then suffer.

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The font Spectral is common on the internet, especially on Substack (which only allows, what, four fonts?).

Too small? Click here; read the “Thunder Gun Express” of Substack posts. It’s just a very long summary of Niccolao Mannuci’s very long travelogue and history of Mughal India – the “Thunder Gun Express” of books.

Which I only learned about yesterday. It’s the awesomest book I’ve heard of. I’m not kidding.

Even if the Bible were turned into a wild AI-generated movie, it wouldn’t be as spectacular as this book.

But I doubt I’ll ever read the book, so thank goodness for the Substack post.

“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.

Body-text fonts, pt. 42: Monotype Garamond (or something close)

At the ripe old age of about sixty, Evelyn Waugh published A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography. It was his last book. Two years later, he died.

A Little Learning begins like this:

How’s that for eloquent weariness?

(There are Garamonds and Garamonds. I don’t know all of their histories. This is Monotype’s metal-type version or something close enough; the digitization is what everyone recognizes from Microsoft Word.)

Waugh’d be a challenge for me to read chronologically because I’ve gone through his early novels many times and his late works hardly at all. I’d have to make it past Brideshead and The Loved One to get to the really unfamiliar stuff. In the mid-1940s, Waugh began tackling a steeper grade than I’ve been able to climb at the breakneck pace he set in his comical works.

It’s better, perhaps, to try going backwards, to begin with sluggish, morbid despair and retrace the author’s path from initial breakneck hilarity (in its way, just as despairing).

Despair usually is a sin, but in Waugh’s case it may actually be a virtue.

Auden’s syllabus

My Uncle John shared a syllabus for a course that W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Auden assigned 6,000 pp. of reading, according to The Paris Review.

(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)

The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”

I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.

What on earth have I been doing since then?

The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)

The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.

Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.

P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.

P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)

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.

Of chainsaws

It’s Prime Day, Prime Day

Gotta get down on Prime Day

Karin bought herself a chainsaw. It arrived a few hours ago and I haven’t seen her since. I wonder what she’s doing with it, out in the yard (rumble, rumble).

I finished re-reading Out of the Silent Planet. I read from this handsome omnibus edition published by Scribner.

I have two complaints about this edition.

(1) The text isn’t always transcribed correctly:

• some paragraphs aren’t indented
• terminal possessive apostrophes are written with double quote marks, as in: suns” blood

This must have been due to a “find-and-replace” error.

(Earlier U.S. editions of OSP follow British convention. They use single quote marks to indicate dialog. Scribner must have decided to replace these marks with double quote marks.

Nothing wrong with that. But it seems to have been done in one fell swoop, sans proofreading.)

The error mars this three-book omnibus edition and various single-book editions of OSP issued by Scribner.

I don’t expect to find this problem in Scribner’s editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Earlier U.S. editions of those books, e.g. those of Macmillan and Collier, already USify the dialog, enclosing it within double quote marks.

(2) My second complaint is that the omnibus lacks the first thirty pages of Perelandra.

Maybe that’s just my copy. Probably not.

I noted, previously, that the baddie, Weston, is a longtermist. He thinks that humans’ most important task – which they should try to fulfill no matter how high the cost – is to colonize other planets before their own planet becomes uninhabitable and humankind dies out.

I wonder, did Elon Musk ever read Out of the Silent Planet?

Should we require all of our governmental officials to read it?

Body-text fonts, pt. 40: Van Dijck

“Based on Dutch Old Style types of the 17th century” (Identifont).

(I have inverted the colors.)

Exiled from Britain, Locke took shelter in the Netherlands. Kudos to the publisher for nodding to this fact with this choice of type.

This sample is from the mid-1970s. Nowadays, the blandest, “safest” Adobe font would be used: scholarly Quality Control has all but banned panache. Pity, because what other thrill is to be had, reading seven hundred pages of Locke?

Body-text fonts, pt. 38: Pilgrim

R.I.P. the Pope.

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This month’s typeface, the designing of which was begun but not completed by Eric Gill, is one of my favorites. Like Ehrhardt and Plantin, it was a common British choice for typesetting paperbacks during the ’fifties, ’sixties, ’seventies, and ’eighties.

Good times!

Then Pilgrim fell into disuse because of the eclipse of metal type. Its decline made it apt for fancy “retro” productions.

It used to grace the cheap stuff. I assume that its name was meant to evoke the oft-reprinted Pilgrim’s Progress.

Incidentally, if you want to know what fonts are especially good at small sizes on cheap paper, compare reprints of The Lord of the Rings. (Don’t look at bibles; too many are incompetently produced.)

I wish Pilgrim would come back into vogue.

A good digital interpretation is Canada Type’s Bunyan Pro. See this PDF for samples, including a short essay on the suitability of Gill’s fonts for body text.

Body-text fonts, pt. 37: Bembo

(I agree with C. S. Lewis here – enthusiastically – insofar as languages make genuine or at least plausible distinctions. But what if, e.g., loving just is liking? Probably not; but the point is, languages might (a) encode different ontologies or inventories of acceptable concepts rather than (b) differ in expressive facility.

Anyway.)

Bembo is one of the oldest and greatest fonts. It’s common in books but less so in desktop publishing. I believe some text editing programs provide Bembo; if yours doesn’t, consider obtaining one of these free variants of the typeface:

(1) Borgia Pro (a clone of this standard version of Bembo, with gratis regular, italic, bold, and bold italic font files);

(2) Cardo (in Google Docs);

(3) fbb (an enhancement of Cardo);

and (4) XETBook (rather like Bembo Book).

Cardo/fbb is the closest thing to the above sample from Lewis. It’s not bad: I see it in some professionally typeset books, e.g. this book requiring lots of extra glyphs for the author’s (Nigerian) name. Tonight I learned that fbb has added a “swashed” Q to its character set. I once wrote a thirty-page research paper with Cardo, using Google Docs (which I don’t recommend for a paper of that length). The typesetting was arduous but, ultimately, successful; the paper wasn’t.

Body-text fonts, pt. 36: Gill Sans

A sans-serif typeface – rare in this series.

Designed by the wicked Eric Gill. Practically synonymous with Britain.

I don’t care for the regular weight, actually, but the lighter weight is very nice in certain settings, e.g. in this remarkable Lego-builders’ book that Samuel borrowed from the library. (I refer to the body text, not the heading.)

I made the caption easier to read:

(Echoes of Ian Fleming’s prose.)

Gill Sans Nova is a nice compromise, weight-wise.

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Ada and George, my little niece and nephew, visited today. They were eager to see their cousins but couldn’t keep their names straight.

Ada drew this card-brandishing soccer referee. Notice the microphone wrapped around his or her cheek.

Body-text fonts, pt. 34: Stempel Garamond

(from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India)

What I really enjoy about Stempel Garamond is that its zero is thickest at the top and bottom ends, rather than at the left and right sides. (This is a feature of the “lining” – i.e., tall or uppercase – zero. The “oldstyle” zero – short or lowercase; in, e.g., “30,” above – is just a thinnish circle.)

It’s unusual for a tall zero to be top-and-bottom heavy.

Cf. the more ordinary tall zero of Adobe Garamond, Stempel Garamond’s plainer descendant.

Body-text fonts, pt. 33: Century Old Style

The “Century” fonts – ITC Century, Century Expanded, Century Old Style, Century Schoolbook, etc. – aren’t as similar as one would expect. This is explained by font-writer Allan Haley:

Century Old Style (this month’s fêted font)

has more character and personality than the other Century designs. It is the red-headed, freckle-faced member of the family.

And why is that?

Not really an Old Style design [the other “Century” fonts aren’t, either], … it does have … angled serifs in the lowercase and a flavor of Old Style traits.

Ah, yes, I see what Halley means. The font is hardly Centaurish (for instance), but it’s also not abjectly un-Venetian.

Also notable is Century Old Style’s wonky uppercase “C.”

The font’s general plainness and its quirks ensure that it

almost cannot be used in an inappropriate application, and it virtually cannot be overused. Where other typefaces, which have a similar range of abilities, can become commonplace or unexciting (sort of typographic vanilla), Century Old Style maintains a personality and a presence (more like French vanilla).

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Some pulpy Vintage Black Lizard crime novels (e.g., by Jim Thompson) are set in Century Old Style. Alas, I can’t find a worthy specimen to post here.

Instead, here is a page from a book of old British commercial art. (The author is Robert Opie, the son of those marvelous antiquarians, Iona & Peter.)

Enlarge, please.

And here is a page from a children’s bible.

Different companies issue darker and lighter versions of Century Old Style. I’m partial to this new (absolutely free!) version. Weary of Times New Roman? Use this instead.