Easy pop quiz: what font are you reading this in? I’m going to take it as an article of faith that those of us who’d frequent the blogs of literary journals would care about such things (show me the writer who has never at some point, in desperation, tried changing the font of a piece of writing in hopes that the appearance would somehow fix whatever wasn’t working). Sans serif, obviously, but can you get any closer?
Answer’ll be at the bottom, but the point isn’t necessarily identification. The bigger question is: how much does a font say, and what?
Under consideration: Simon Garfield’s excellent and hugely engaging Just My Type, every fontlovers dream book. This book was of course praised wonderfully in the Times a few weeks back on its release, and I don’t think I’ve got more to add to the review than what Maslin already said (other than maybe this: that ampersand’s lineage is riveting and worth anyone’s time, and the “dark biographical” stuff regarding Eric Gill is so ridiculously dark it’ll creep you out to use that font [or, at least, it’s creeped me out]). But the larger questions Just My Type raises are, I think especially for writers, pretty fascinating.
Here’s the other river that flows, at least for this reader, into Garfield’s book: Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, a strange and awesome book (he called it a manifesto, and yes, I’m talking about that strange-looking and -sounding dude from the NYorker profile earlier this year). The easiest way to hellishly oversimplify and encapsulate Lanier’s argument goes something like this: we’re bound, devilishly, by the structures we take part in, and that limitation can have terrible and lasting influence on how we conceive of new experience. My vote for the most interesting section of Lanier’s Gadget is about the development of Midi files, and how decisions made right at the start of that technology’s ‘life’ have now come to influence (big gulp) the way devices are now designed and what they’re capable of. I’m not gonna do justice to the man: go buy the book, you’ll be glad.
Back to Garfield, though: his book, thankfully, avoids any explicit noodly and drawn-out consideration of the conjunction between the way a type looks and the message being conveyed (certain examples come up, certainly, though for those who love hating Comic Sans I’ll here report that Garfield’s chapter on that specific type might tame your hatred, mildly). It’s a great trick, in fact: by choosing not to focus on any specific misused font, Garfield’s whole book makes the reader wonder about text and message and the relationship between the two (or maybe it only offers that experience to the reader nerdy enough to so care about such things).
The other book Just My Type‘s got weird similarities to is de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, which, yes, I know, de Botton’s a prickly whatever and ha ha on being a massively wealthy and having the audacity to write about work, but Architecture: that thing was phenomenal: it allowed slash invited slash demanded laypeople examine structures with new, keener eyes, or did me anyway. Type‘s massively similar: the day after I read this book I was watching the Fort Wayne TinCaps play a baseball game and found myself happily tracking and identifying the font of the away team’s jerseys’ numbers (Cooper Black). And of course I ended up there behind home plate thinking: why? Why’re the numbers that font?
There’s no clear answer to that, or, inevitably, to lots of the questions that’ll you’ll consider after reading Type. Why, for instance, do most television news programs feature sans serif fonts? What do the differences in fonts actually do to you, make you feel or think or read differently because of them?
I’m writing this in Garamond (I’d guess there are quite a few of us who, coming of age under McSweeney’s spell, latched somehow onto Garamond because of wherever it was Eggers mentioned how Garamond is the best ever), which I’ve now written in for six years and can’t imagine quitting (last font: Palatino). I write literary fiction and poetry: I can’t imagine something as arch as poetry in a sans serif font, but I now can’t help but wondering how my own writing would change if I were writing in, say, Helvetica, or some sturdy and moderately serious sans serif. I’d be fascinated to hear, from anyone interested in divulging, what everyone’s default font is. I know for sure from now on one of the questions I’ll be asking all authors in interviews. Drop a note in the comments, for real: what’s your font?
(As promised: Verdana, by the way. You’re reading this in Verdana, unless yr browser defaults to Ariel or Helvetica, but more than likely: Verdana. Congrats if you knew. Font nerd.)