Gutenberg's Fingerprint

by Merilyn Simonds

  Comic Sans isn’t the only typeface to rouse strong public opinion. When the movie Avatar was released, fans were appalled at the Papyrus typeface James Cameron chose for the subtitles that ran through the film. When posters were unveiled for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Episode VII, released in 2015) there was a happy outcry: the title was set in ITC Serif Gothic, the same typeface used in the promotion of the first Star Wars movie—a curvy, iconic ’70s face that has since been used on everything from Eraserhead posters to the cover of Colleen McCullough’s blockbuster novel The Thorn Birds. The C’s and E’s are throwbacks to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Roaring twenties; the , , and ligatures are brilliantly nestled together, the a lazy, elegant coda to this pop-culture alphabet.

  Most of us can’t imagine getting that exercised over a typeface. Thirty-five years ago, when my publisher suggested Bembo for my first book, I shrugged. Fine by me, I said. I was hardly aware of the existence of typefaces. I do remember firing up my first computer and being vaguely disappointed at the utilitarian Helvetica, but I wouldn’t have gone so far as typeface maven Bruno Maag, who calls Helvetica a “cultural blight. If you think of ice cream, [Helvetica] is a cheap, nasty, supermarket brand made of water, substitutes, and vegetable fats.” Mike Battista, a blogger at Phronk.com who claims he is tired of the typeface wars and what he calls “the font police,” nevertheless champions Univers, also a Swiss design. “There’s no fuss and schmuss about it, it’s a clean, tight design. If Helvetica is Julia Roberts—pretty enough—then Univers is Uma Thurman—really cool.”

  One of the consequences of the digital revolution is that even a six-year-old is likely to be conversant in typefaces. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have always known that typeface matters, but now Two Men and a Truck and the Limestone Cupcakery are aware of it, too, and so is the student formatting her résumé for her first job application and the little boy hammering out invitations to his Hallowe’en party.

  In the end, I chose Book Antiqua as my typeface for writing Gutenberg’s Fingerprint. Readers will never know that unless I tell them: they see only the typeface that the designer chooses to present my words. As I write this, I have no idea what that might be, although I hope I am consulted. I promise I won’t shrug. Like the rest of the digitally literate world, I have discovered that I do care. A lot.

  THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

  Hugh doesn’t have a favourite font.

  “Not font,” Hugh says sharply. “Typeface.”

  Within the language of printers, I stumble and grasp as stupidly as a two-year-old. I thought font and typeface were interchangeable. After all, doesn’t my Mac refer to its assembly of typefaces as a font collection?

  “What’s the difference?” I ask, the apprentice humbled before the master.

  “Easy. A face is what you see. A font is what you use.”

  Easy for him, maybe. He can tell by the puzzled look on my face (not my font) that his explanation has done nothing to clear my confusion. He ambles over to a tall cabinet and pulls out the top drawer. It is divided into dozens of small sections like a jewellery box or a cattle pen, each one heaped with metal letters. He waves his arm across the drawer.

  “This is all Garamond, the typeface for The Paradise Project.”

  The studio is so compact that, without taking another step, he turns and lifts a wooden frame from his worktable. Inside the frame are lines of metal type, the first few paragraphs of my opening story, “Root.” He fingers a capital letter E out of his Garamond drawer and holds it up beside the frame.

  “You see? Each letter is a metal block, with the character in relief on one face of the block. It used to be carved and now it’s cast in a mould, but forget about that for now. The important thing is, this is the typeface—the face of the type that makes an imprint on paper. When I choose Garamond as the typeface for a project, I have to buy metal blocks of different point sizes: 10 or 12 or 14 point for the text and 18 or 20 point for titles. I’ll also need faces of different weights: bold, medium, and light. And I’ll need italics, too. Garamond Italic is a font. Garamond Bold is a font. Garamond 12 point is a font. Garamond is the typeface. The fonts of a typeface all reflect the same basic design principles.”

  © HERSH JACOB

  I get it now. A typeface is the design of a particular alphabet. A font is a collection of characters—capital letters, lowercase letters, numerals, and punctuation marks—rendered in one particular size and style. A typeface will be available in several different fonts.

  Today, typeface is delivered as a digital software file that can be adjusted to any size in the formatting menu. A stroke of the keyboard converts a letter to italic or bold. When my son Erik and I discuss the typeface for the digital version of The Paradise Project, I suggest ITC Serif Gothic.

  “I like the ligatures,” I say, trying out my new language.

  “Oh, you can turn ligatures on and off,” Erik says, airily dismissing ligature as a criteria. He has been working as a book designer for years, specializing in digital books and winning awards for his work. “I think we want a font that’s modern, but understated, not too literary—sorry, by that I mean romantic—something clean and very legible at a small size. A typeface with some presence to it.”

  My son throws face and font around indiscriminately, as is accepted in the digital world. Surely I can be forgiven for confusing the terms. Hugh disagrees. The minute I step inside his studio, I am in his world—a place where face and font are apples and oranges. In the digital world, Apples aren’t oranges, they’re computers.

  On one essential point, however, Erik agrees with Hugh when he says, “Typeface speaks volumes for a book. Not that it changes the meaning of the words, but it gives a completely different feel to them.”

  I see that. A typeface can make words seem shouted or whispered, they can be prissy and old-fashioned or lippy and modern, quiet or fun or both. Computers may have made us more aware of the existence of typefaces, but their power is still largely subliminal.

  My son can choose from an almost limitless array of typefaces: 1001FreeFonts.com alone offers 28,320 fonts/faces for free.

  Hugh has six: Garamond and Bodoni in Roman and Italic in three sizes; Caslon in roman and italic in four sizes; Bembo in roman and italic 12 point; Elegantis in 36, 48, and 72-point roman; Goudy Old Style in open face (an engraved line along the left side of the letter prints like a white shadow); and a sans serif called Twentieth Century in 12 point. He also has ten drawers of wooden type that he hasn’t yet identified.

  When he chose Garamond for the main text of The Paradise Project, he did so because the 14-point Bodoni is too heavy. The great British designer William Morris agrees, referring to Bodoni as a “sweltering hideousness.” Twelve-point Bembo, Hugh says, is too light. And apparently, sans serif doesn’t suit my writing.

  “Serif is more formal, prettier,” he says, grasping for words to articulate what is, for him, a gut instinct. Serif type is footed, which means it has an extra stroke that finishes off the line at the bottom and sometimes at the top of a letter. Serifs were developed by medieval scribes to fix a problem endemic to writing with pen and ink: the pressure of the pen falls on the end of the stroke and ink is inclined to drag, so the end of a letter was often ragged and sometimes blotchy. Scribes took to bracketing the letter in the direction of the stroke to finish it off neatly. Then, to balance the letter, they added a stroke to the opposite side, too, and, presto, the serif was born.

  The English word was originally “ceref,” probably from the Dutch schreef, meaning “a line or stroke.” You can hear the word “script” in there, too. Ceref didn’t become serif until 1841, although, curiously, sans serif (which incorporates the French sans, meaning “without”) was coined earlier, in 1830.

  My husband has been known to toss aside a book set in sans serif with the comment, “I can’t read this. It’s obviously a piece of fluff.”

  I like san
s serif. I appreciate the way the letters stand apart, as if on tiptoe, leaving breathing space between them, each consonant and vowel having its individual say. The British call the square-cut sans serif typefaces grotesques: wildly formed, of irregular proportions, boldly odd. I’m a little put out that Hugh doesn’t think this is suitable for my stories, which are experimental—as wild and irregular as I’m likely to get.

  He bustles out of the studio and crosses the deck to his house, returning a few moments later with the only book he has ever set in sans serif, Where Do I Start?, based on emails his daughter sent to him about her work with drug addicts and street people on Vancouver’s downtown east side.

  “In the emails, words are spelled wrong, periods are missing, and what the hell are commas anyway? I went through the text and cleaned it all up and then I reread it and said, ‘Hugh you really screwed that up!’ It wasn’t real anymore. It was just a piece of work. So I took the text back to how she wrote it, and I chose a sans serif typeface because I didn’t want it to look pretty, or formal, or literary. The writing was raw. I wanted the typeface to be raw, too.”

  Grotesque, in the wildest, boldest sense of the word.

  Garamond, on the other hand, reminds me of very precise, old-fashioned handwriting. Hugh points to the distinctive e and a, marked by what he calls a “small bowl.” The uppercase W looks like two V’s overlaid, instead of one distinct letter. It is a serif face, which doesn’t surprise me. Hugh is a fan of footed typefaces; he likes the way the serifs help the eye connect the letters. He says the long extenders and top serifs have a downward slope, although I can’t see it. The variation in stroke width, he declares, is minimal.

  “I chose Garamond because it has a very honest face,” he says. “It’s natural-looking. It’s not trying to be something else.” He winks at me. “Besides, I have a lot of it, so I can set several pages at once.”

  Garamond is widely thought to be the most readable typeface when printed on paper. When I first started teaching online, I held fast to my typewriter faces, insisting that students submit their work in Times or Courier, until a fellow teacher called me a dinosaur. Indeed, computer manufacturers had already decided on the most readable onscreen faces and made these the default fonts: Helvetica in Mac and Arial in Windows.

  Today, Helvetica and Arial users may be the dinosaurs. Half a century ago, when computers were first developed, the low-resolution screens didn’t have enough pixels to display details of a typeface. The feet on serifs tended to break up and disappear. As Tobias Frere-Jones, one of the great contemporary type designers, declared, “Some of the world’s greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts.”

  It wasn’t long before new typefaces were designed specifically for digital applications, with features that would have been impossible with metal type: tight kerning (the spacing between characters), characters that extend over or under adjoining characters, a wide variety of weights and, most important, a single design that covers all point sizes.

  A recent study of onscreen readability found no significant difference in reading speed or reading comprehension among scores of test subjects who read text set in four different typefaces, including both serif and sans serif: Georgia, Times, Verdana, and Arial.

  Despite that, the consensus among designers seems to be that the fewer details a font needs to convey a character, the more readable it will appear on a broad range of screens, which means that digitally, sans serif typefaces still edge out the serifs.

  “There are trends in typography, like everything else,” my son says, “and that influences what people see as best practices. In the early ’90s, there was a real us-and-them thing about digital and print, so the digital designers were all using sans serif, no caps anywhere. Now everyone is using Gotham, no bells and flourishes, strictly utilitarian, but in a few years we’ll be looking back and saying, ‘Oh that’s so 2015.’”

  His font of choice is a serif. “Sans serif is a little abrupt and awkward on the brain. I’ve read studies that show the eye reads serif faces better, both onscreen and on the page, because the swoop of the foot of one character leads to the swoop of the next.” He’s channeling Hugh.

  “I like Chaparral because it has a gentle slab serif: a bit of curve on the beginning of the serif, then squared off. It has a chunkiness to it, a little more aggressive, a little more masculine, but with lovely ligatures.” I grin and he grins, too. “A nice and easy typeface to read.”

  High-resolution screens offer more typographical choice, but at the same time the proliferation of devices for reading onscreen has made a designer’s job harder. A typeface may be read on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop computer, and, as my son points out, each of them might be anywhere from a year to ten years old. “And remember, a font will look slightly different depending on whether you are using Windows or a Mac operating system.” He shakes his head. “It’s a designer’s nightmare.”

  TYPECAST

  I’m teaching at Sage Hill, a writing retreat in Saskatchewan with limited Internet access, when my son and I finally connect to discuss the guts of the ebook version of The Paradise Project.

  “Are you looking at it on your iPad or your phone?” he says. “You should try it on as many devices as possible.” Soon I have both the original print version and his new edesign side by side.

  “The apostrophe is odd,” I say for starters. “It looks like it’s added later, no space for it between the letters. Look at ‘he’d’ on page 4.”

  “Not there,” he says. “That’s the thing about ebooks: your page 4 won’t be mine. What font are you in?”

  I check. The electronic file offers eight faces, as I stubbornly insist on calling them. My son may be ambidextrous when it comes to face and font, but I’m sticking with Hugh.

  “Original. The face you designed it in, I guess.”

  “Switch to Georgia.”

  I do and the apostrophe corrects itself.

  “Okay, I’ll fix that,” he says. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I feel my son withdraw. I’ve failed some test.

  Finally, he says, “I thought you’d say, ‘Wow! That’s amazing. It’s a thousand times better.’ But you didn’t. And that’s okay.”

  “I didn’t know what I was looking at.” It’s a poor excuse, but it’s the truth. My face-recognition skills are clearly at a low level, my apprenticeship with Hugh notwithstanding. I peer at the face my son has chosen for the ebook, swivelling back and forth to the print version. Slowly, I see it: the descenders slender and elegant, not curved like a Victorian spoon handle; numerals that sit up on the line beside the letters instead of drooping below; concise italics and roman that, even at 9 point, are beautifully legible; drop caps to open the sections and chapter titles in a soft pearl grey. I play with the other faces, then with type size, making the text tiny, then big enough for the half-blind. No matter how I manipulate the text, the flow is perfect, the design still elegant and readable. He’s right, I should have exclaimed with joy.

  “I’m a firm believer in making text as accessible as possible. I don’t want a bunch of fancy codes that only a new device can read. But the thing about the latest ebook software is that you can lock in special fonts and page views. You can see it exactly as the designer intended it to be read.”

  “Sounds like ebooks are going back to letterpress.”

  He laughs. “In a way. Except that you can still change the typeface back to Helvetica and jack the whole book up to any size type you want. But you’re right, the days of us-and-them, digital-versus-print, are long gone.”

  There it is again: us and them. I was among the first of my friends to get a computer: I wrote my early books on a Commodore 64. Wayne, on the other hand, was among the last to go digital. I tease him mercilessly about being a stick-in-the-mud. He calls me a flibbertigibbet, grasping at every shiny n
ew thing, each of us smug in our early adopter/Luddite roles. Back then, the distinction between past and present was clear: you either had a computer on the desk and the lingo on the tongue—RAM, hard drive, floppy disk, high-res—or you didn’t. But now that everyone from eight- to eighty-year-olds is plugged in, that line in the sand serves no purpose. I see the same thing here at Sage Hill, when the twenty-something program assistant spins vinyl on a real record player, Bluetoothed to his speakers: the past is no longer uncool, it’s embedded in the present.

  Maybe that’s how we know we’re coasting down the other side of a paradigm shift, by the way the pieces are settling into place. I can finally admit that I love Courier, that after a day of writing onscreen, a paper book in the hand feels oh so fine. Such choices don’t say a thing about how stuck in the dark ages I am or how cutting-edge. It’s just Courier. It’s just a book.

  My son and I talk about errant hyphens. For some reason, pouring the text into the ebook format has preserved end-of-line-break hyphens from the original text, even though the hyphenated words are now securely reattached in the middle of a line. We decide to deal with the problem at the proofing stage.

  In the background, I can hear his daughters doing the dishes. He is at his farmhouse in the Northumberland hills north of Cobourg, Ontario; the girls have been riding all week, practising for a jumping competition at the local horse show. Outside my window in Saskatchewan, newly fledged barn swallows chatter and beg, then take off from the balcony to swoop over Blackstrap Lake to the bald prairie beyond. If this were Hugh I was talking to, I’d have to be in the room with him, picking out the apostrophes by hand. It is miraculous that my son and I can consult by cellphone from our various lives, but even so, I feel the miles that separate us.