How to use this Page

What’s your favorite font? Find it on the gigantic Periodic Table of Typefaces, a new poster from Gotham Books to promote the September paperback release of Just My Type by Simon Garfield.

We’ve embedded the image above, but click here to explore a larger copy of the image.

Here’s more about the book: “Just My Type is a book of stories about fonts. It examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook. The book is about that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about. And beyond all this, the book reveals what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world – and what your choice of font says about you.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Are you a typography geek, able to identify fonts used in books, menus, and corporate logos? Or is Comic Sans the only font you recognize? Regardless of where you fall, Simon Garfield’s Just My Type is a fascinating look at fonts.

Just My Type is not a font identification guide or a chronological history of fonts. I’m not actually sure how Garfield organized the book’s chapters; after discussing how desktop computing revolutionized our relationship with type, he dives into the history of the aforementioned Comic Sans and the animosity many people feel towards it. Garfield also finds the time to discuss legibility vs. readability, the ampersand (did you know that while “long treated as a single character or glyph, the ampersand is actually two letters combined – the e and the t of the Latin ‘et’”? I had no idea!), DIY typography, and more, while also jumping around through time to discuss the creation and influence of significant fonts, like Helvetica and Baskerville, among others.

So while there were times I wished for more organizational clarity, I also found it stimulating to not know where Garfield would head next. Would it be a discussion of typographic errors in movies, where fonts were used in movies set prior to the font’s creation? Pirated fonts and the lack of intellectual property rights where fonts are concerned? The fonts used in the 2008 presidential campaigns?

Just My Type was originally published in Great Britain last year and it retains its Britishness in the American edition. Garfield proves a lively and opinionated guide to the world of fonts, so if you’re at all interested in fonts and typography, this is very much worth a look.

Book source: the bookstore, via my wallet.

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.