December 2007 Archives

"Bugsy [Siegel] pulled into Las Vegas in 1945 with several million dollars that, after his assassination, was traced back in the general direction of gangster-financiers. Siegel put up a hotel-casino such as Las Vegas had never seen and called it the Flamingo. . . . Everybody drove out Route 91 just to gape. . . . Such colors! All the new electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green, viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange, scarlet-fever purple, cyanic blue, tessellated bronze, hospital-fruit-basket orange. And such signs! Two cylinders rose at either end of the Flamingo--eight stories high and covered from top to bottom with neon rings in the shape of bubbles that fizzed all eight stories up into the desert sky all night long like an illuminated whisky-soda tumbler filled to the brim with pink champagne."

--Tom Wolfe, Las Vegas (What?), from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965.

"Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields."

--Tom Wolfe, The Last American Hero, from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965.

"The main thing you notice is the color--tangerine flake. This paint--one of [George] Barris' Kandy Kolor concoctions--makes the car look like it has been encrusted with chips of some kind of semi-precious ossified tangerine, all coated with a half-inch of clear lacquer. There used to be very scholarly and abstruse studies of color and color symbolism around the turn of the century, and theorists concluded that preferences for certain colors were closely associated with rebelliousness, and these are the very same color many of the kids go for--purple, carnal yellow, various violets and lavenders and fuchsias and many other of these Kandy Kolors."

--Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965.

 

Bottom Line Music, 1338 E. Washington Street.

Slang punctuation refers to the use of standard punctuation marks in non-standard ways, such as the augmentation by repetition of, for instance, an exclamation mark!!! As soon as I learned the phrase I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I had not read since high school. (I graduated in 1976, part of America’s great, slouching “Bicentennial Class.”) I remembered crazy careening punctuation, struggling to express the incredible and the inexpressible, perfect for a book about the original hippies, beamed up from 1968.
    So I found a copy at my local parish library and took another look. The book is still great; a fun read at the very least. The story, of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in mid-1960s America, reads like fiction, like fantasy, but it is Tom Wolfe at his journalistic best. But this is, or was, the “new journalism”  which allowed for great liberties, such as the liberal use of slang punctuation.
    The most striking typographic feature in the book is a repeated mark, but not an exclamation mark. Wolfe uses a quieter mark, one that represents a pause, a rest that is longer than a semi-colon but shorter than a period or full-stop: yes, the colon. When the reader first meets this mark it is in the context of a dappled grove, the dots suggesting perhaps specks of sunlight:

“[I]f there was any place for curing the New York thing, this was it, out back of Kesey’s in the lime :::::: light :::::: bower :::::: up the path out back of the house, up the hill into the redwood forest. . . . It was always sunny and cool at the same time, like a perfect fall day all year around. The sun came down through miles of leaves and got broken up like a pointillist painting, deep green and dapple shadows but brilliant light in a soaring deep green super-bower, a perpetual lime-green light, green-and-gold afternoon, stillness, perpendicular peace, wood-scented, with the cars going by on Route 84 just adding pneumatic sound effects, sheee-ooooooooo, like a gentle wind.” (pp. 59-60)

    But the repeated colon is soon used, without word breaks, to suggest the nervousness of sleep deprivation:

“Sandy hasn’t slept in days::::::how many::::::like total insomnia and everything is bending in curvy curdling lines.” (p. 95)

    These Wolfeian colons, or Wolfe’s teeth, as I prefer to call them (anything but a colon block, please) are used in a more consistent manner as the book progresses. Maybe Wolfe just liked the look of them. Maybe they represent microdots. But I think it is most likely that the colons, typically five or six of them in a row, suggest a special kind of pause, maybe the chaos of primordial consciousness: thought; astonishing, unspeakable, or simply emerging thought, before it crystallizes into words:

“One night he discovers he can unpaint the bus just by staring at it. He has psychokinetic powers. . . . The waves crash below the Esalen cliff—and he stares at the bus and . . . unpaints it. He strips one whole side down to its original sunny school-bus yellow. The whole Prankster overlay is gone. A trick of the mind? He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars—then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED :::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.” (p. 125)

“Christ, man! It’s too much for us even! We wash our hands of this ::::: Atrocity :::::
    ::::: what . . . exactly have we done? and :::::
    ::::: even to some Pranksters . . . the Test was a debacle.” (p. 297)

“It will take a miracle to even get him out on bail, an inspiration, a vision ::::: ummm, a vision ::::: we can work it out ::::: Kesey’s lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan and Paul Robertson, have a vision.” (pp. 389-390)

“The Grateful Dead . . . They’ve been doing all right! Since the Acid Tests they have become a thing, the pioneers of the new sound, acid rock, with the record companies beginning to sniff around :::: hmmmmm :::: the very next thing? Freak that.” (p. 402)

    Wolfe’s teeth, let us call them, are specific to this book; I can’t recall ever seeing them elsewhere. But Tom Wolfe also takes some other, more common liberties in this book, such as the use of phonetic spelling to capture dialect and inflection. This practice dates back at least to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. But Mark Twain never stretched his words this far:

“She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit you and I, and she says: ‘Ooooooooh, you really think that, I know what you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’—finishing off in a sailing tremulo laugh as if she has just read your breain and it is the weirdest of the weirtd shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—” (pp. 87-88)

“‘I’m—I’m—I’m—I’m—getting the picture! We’re—all here—right? We’re all here! We’re—he-e-e-e-e-e-ere! . . .
    ‘I’m—getting the picture! We’re all he-e-e-e-e-ere and we can do anything we want!’” (pp. 424-425)

    Sometimes the phonetics are outside of the dialog, where they give a cartoon-like sense of exaggeration and humor to some of the events in this, let us remember, non-fiction adventure:

“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev” (p. 304)

“SHHHHHHHHHHWAAAAAAAAAP” (p.317, cap and small caps)

“Urgggggggggghhhhhh the prosecutor agreed on it, her lawyer agreed on it, the Judge agreed on it. So went the Justice game.” (p. 323)

“—just then—
    FEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOO
    ¡WHOP!
    —Cassady—twenty feet away across the beachroad has suddenly wheeled andfired the four-pund sledge hammer end-over-end like a bolo and smashed the brick on top of the fence into obliteration, fifteen feet from the Mexican.” (p. 351, caps and small caps)

    Did you notice the inverted exclamation mark, standard practice in Spanish, used here in an English context? Wolfe does it again here, casually jumbling the Mexican and American cultures:

“¡Hoy! ¡Pronto!” he keeps shouting. ¡Hurry up! Get your asses back to the store!” (p. 356)

    Now, at this point I’m sure that many of you are wondering: where is the classic exclamation mark augmented by repetition?! Well, it’s here in the book, but it falls outside of the Tom Wolfe’s authorial voice. The stuttering exclamation mark is the voice of the common people, the generic Beautiful People, whose travels were probably inspired by the same events that inspired Wolfe’s book:

“Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went:
    ‘Dear Mother,
    ‘I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven’t been worried, I am in [San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende, Mazatlan, Mexico!!!!] and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene.’” (pp. 140-141)

“The hobo lives in a Disneyland, Pete-the-Tramp land, where everything is human lions, tin men, moondogs with rubber teeth, orange-and-purple paths, emerald castles in the distance looming. . . . The hobo has two watches you can’t buy in Tiffany’s, on one wrist the sun, on the other wrist the moon, both bands are made of sky.”

—Jack Kerouac, The Vanishing American Hobo, from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.

“What about the Black Hobo? Moonshiner? Chicken snatcher? Remus? The black hobo in the South is the last of the Brueghel bums, children pay tribute and stand in awe making no comment. You see him coming out of the piney barren with an old unspeakable sack. Is he carrying coons? Is he carrying Br’er Rabbit? Nobody knows what he’s carrying.”

—Jack Kerouac, The Vanishing American Hobo, from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.

“Suddenly a green-rose rainbow appears right on your ridge with steamy clouds all around and an orange sun turmoiling . . .

What is a rainbow,
Lord?—a hoop
For the lowly

. . . and you go out and suddenly your shadow is ringed by the rainbow as you walk on the hilltop, a lovely-haloed mystery making you want to pray.—”

—Jack Kerouac, Alone on a Mountaintop, from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.

“Known as The Mother Road, the nostalgic journey from Chicago to L.A. takes one back to the good old days.” A Christmas postcard from Tricia Tommerdahl.

“Clearly you need new furniture. To select exactly what you want, you need to have some Creative Decorating Ideas, which you get by purchasing about $65 worth of glossy magazines with names like Unaffordable Home Design. Inside these magazines will be exquisite color photographs of the most wondrously perfect, profoundly clean rooms anybody has ever seen, rooms where even the air molecules are arranged in attractive patterns. How, you ask yourself, can rooms look like this? Where are the hand smudges? Where is the dark spot on the carpet where the dog threw up the unidentified reptile? And how come there are never any people in these photographs?
    The answer is: These rooms are only four inches high. The magazines have them built by skilled craftsmen solely for the purpose of making your home look, by comparison, like a Roach Motel. In fact, occasionally a magazine will slip up, and you’ll see through the window of what is allegedly a rich person’s living room, what appears to be a 675-pound thumb.”
   
—Dave Barry, Subhumanize Your Living Room, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

If you don’t know me personally, then you might not know that I have been writing an essay on the terminology of typography which I plan to submit to Verbatim, an academic lexicographic quarterly. I’m as over-ambitious for this project as I have ever been for any project, so I am determined to create a humorous but thorough and perhaps even a profound work. A comic typographic Moby Dick, if you will.
    Last night I finished it. Or I went to bed thinking I had. But this morning I was bothered by an inkling of one last term, but one that I was not at all sure of. It involved a colon and a dash, and had something to do with two balls, and a prick. So I googled two balls and a prick. The results I were interesting, but I found no reference whatsoever to punctuation or typography.
    Then I googled punctuation and colon and I was onto something. Yes, the combination of a colon and a dash, which at one time was fairly common but has now been replaced by just the colon, is sometimes referred to, according to a post at a discussion group, as a colon-dash or a dog’s prick. A dog’s prick! But no, this gets stranger. The Partridge Dictionary of Slang, according to another person, defines a dog’s prick as typographic slang for an exclamation mark! Could it refer to both, I wondered?
    Well, no. According to the 1949 third edition of the Partridge Dictionary of Slang, “the typographical colon-dash (:—)” is sometimes referred to as dog’s ballocks. And the Oxford English Dictionary, in an online ‘draft revision’ dated July 2007, concurs:

“dog's bollocks n. (also dog's ballocks) Brit. coarse slang (a) Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs (see quot. 1949) (rare); (b) (with the) the very best, the acme of excellence; cf. the cat's whiskers at CAT n.1 13l, bee's knee n. (b) at BEE n.1 5b.”

    The bee’s knee. How could I have possibly thought, last night, that the essay was complete.

“=|:-)=  This e-mail is being monitored by Uncle Sam for your protection.“ An emoticon from The New Yorker. Thank you Jim Kellough!

“We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.
    First off, we should enact an ‘e’ tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary ‘e,’ such as shoppe or olde, and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per ‘e.’ We should also consider an additional $50,000 ‘ye’ tax, so that the owner of a store called ‘Ye Olde Shoppe’ would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as ‘Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,’ the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.”

—Dave Barry, Ye Olde Humor Columne, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

“Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

The TURKISH BATHS. A central Baton Rouge landmark, just south of the I-10 bridge. For a decade or two, a decade or two ago, it was a practice space for many a Baton Rouge band. I took these pictures to catch the old signage, having heard by way of Culture Candy that the building was destined to become a contemporary art ‘House Project’ before its demolition.
    Sadly, the House Project team is now looking for another building to ‘project,’ because they have been informed that the demolition and razing of the Turkish Baths has been ‘moved forward,’ meaning, I suppose, that the building will be quite gone soon. Yes, Chloe, it’s the end of another area.

“The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy—you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society—the society of contemporaries.”

—Dave Hickey, talking with Sari Karel at zingmagazine.

“‘But of course,’ she said, ‘it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.’”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

“‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

“‘Real G-g-green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks. There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is like swallowing a sp-spectrum.’”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.

“It might have been at a time of night when people say they see reality in a dream. Almost catching my breath, I looked on this strange scene. By the dim light of the andon, I could see the Emperor doll holding an ivory sceptre, the Empress doll—its tiara bedecked with jewels, the ukon wild orange, the sakon cherry, the porter carrying a long-handled umbrella, the Court Lady holding up a food tray a little below the level of her eyes, the small gold-lacquered mirror and chest, a small folding screen decorated with shell, the rice bowls, the decorated candle shades, the balls of colored thread, and again, my father’s profile. . . .
    As if I were seeing them in a dream, . . . ah, that is what I have already said.”

—Ryunosuke Akutagawa, The Dolls, from Exotic Japanese Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagaway, translated by Takashi Kojima and John McVittie, 1964.

Lexicographically speaking, 2007 was all about w00t, which Merriam-Webster (the dictionary) has named Word of the Year. For more about l33t sp34k, click here or here. Ph342 /\/\j 133+ 5|<1||%!!!

There’s a new link to your left, a blog from HP Labs called, intriguingly, Mostly color perception. It’s as intelligent and as technical as you might expect a blog from HP Labs to be, but it’s not an advertisement and some interesting things are happening there. Nathan Moroney, who holds both a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree in Color Science, is, for instance, conducting an online Color Naming Experiment and a separate Color Name Comparison Experiment. Participation in the study is easy. With just a few clicks and keystrokes, by naming some color swatches at the first experiment, and by comparing a few color terms at the second, anyone can contribute to it.
    So far there have been over 20,000 responses, and the resulting database has been used to create An On-Line Color Thesaurus which contains, according to Nathan Moroney, over 800 different color names. If you like color terms like I like color terms, you won’t want to miss it.

“The kind of title you attach to your work says a lot about how you perceive the book’s intentions. The descriptive title announces a book to be used; the poetic title a book to be enjoyed.”

—William Germano, Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, 2001.

“The word processor exerts a curious effect on writing; it makes everything you peck out look neat, and neat rapidly becomes convincing. The computer makes storage so easy that nothing is wasted; chapters can grow beyond their needs, frequently augmented by bits the author has reinserted with the cut-and-paste function. Are word-processed manuscripts longer than those from the Typewriter Era, or does it just seem that way? Fortunately, the same word processor that records each of your thoughts in 12 pt Times Roman also counts your words for you. Know how long your word-processed text is.”

—William Germano, Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, 2001.

“Cover from Vogue, Vol. 145, No. 10, June 1965. . . . Montage with photograph by Irvine Penn and serigraph construction by Gerald Oster.”

—Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

“‘I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bond-holders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.’”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“The spectral opposites of black and white embody the most extreme visual contrast and can summon myriad optical effects, including spatial illusion, virtual motion, after-images, and phantom color. Goethe made observations on such phenomena in his theories on optics and color, but it was Gestalt psychologists who later explained how the brain interprets perception to create these phenomena in the mind. . . . Optical illusions, which accentuate the disjuncture between knowledge and vision, became an early subject of interest to perceptual artists.”

 —John Houston, Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, 2007.

“Negatives—positives . . . the hallucinatory play of black and white . . . I deduced therefrom, philosophically speaking, that white and black signs, and the inevitable antinomy of the ideas of the past, like ‘day and night’, ‘angel and devil’, ‘good and evil’, are in reality complementaries, a fertile androgynous idea . . . White and black, yes and no, it is the binary language of cybernetics, making possible the building of a plastic bank in electronic brains. White and black, it is the indestructibility of art-thought and hence the perenniality of the work in its original form.”

—Victor Vasarely, 1965; quoted in Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

“Unknown Chinese artist, A Wave Under the Moon. Twelfth century, ink on silk, detail of a scroll.”

—Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

“Marina Apollonio, Italian, born 1940. Installation proposal, 1967/71.”

—Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

“Packaging for Antivertigo medication (Antivert), manufacturef by Pfizer Company Ltd, c. 1970. Private collection, Columbia, Ohio.”

—Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

“Optical art, Pop Art and Minimal art were, first and foremost, arts of peace, not arts of war.”

—Dave Hickey, introduction to Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, by John Houston, 2007.

“Op art . . . goes Pop art one better by being considerably more mindless.”

—Barbara Rose, in ArtForum International, 1965, quoted in Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, by John Houston, 2007

“[O]ptical art teaches its beholders a lesson taught by psychedelic drugs at a considerably higher level of risk: it insists on the absolute otherness of a world beyond us by dramatizing the threshhold at which our ability to interpret that world begins to degrade and disintegrate.”

—Dave Hickey, introduction to Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, by John Houston, 2007.

Via NFG!

“As by a fascination, every eye was now directed to the glaring greenish-grey eye of Simon.”

“It is now one of those intensely golden sunsets which kindles the whole horizon into one blaze of glory, and makes the water another sky. The lake lay in rosy or golden streaks, save where white-winged vessels glided hither and thither, like so many spirits, and little golden stars twinkled through the glow, and looked down at themselves as they trembled in the water.”

“Having learned late in life, Tom was but a slow reader, and passed on laboriously from verse to verse. Fortunate for him was it that the book he was intent on was one which slow reading cannot injure—nay, one whose words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to be weighed separately, that the mind may take in their priceless value.”

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.

Some more type specimens from the 1969 LetterGraphics catalog of the previous post. The typefaces are Arriola Caslon Swash, Brandywine, Stein Long, Charlie Pointed, and, Spring. I particularly like the use of Spring in the faux-headline about depression. It’s a hopeful touch. I recognize a lot of the fonts in this catalog ffrom greeting cards; 1969 must have been a watershed year for greeting cards. If you consider that in 1969 Rod McKuen (available now in every thirft store) was by far America’s best-selling poet, it all starts to make a kind of crazy sense.

It’s the end of the semester, and on monday I ran into a pile of old books that were up for grabs before going into the trash. Imagine my astonishment as I opened a plain black three-ring binder and discovered New LetterGraphics Styles 1969, a type catalog from LetterGraphics of Culver City, California. It was disheveled and out of order, but I was looking at type specimens from 1969! Rock and roll!!!
    Here, purely for your enjoyment, are some representative specimens. The fonts, from top to bottom, are Arriola Caslon, Bookman Bold Swash, Brandywine, Data Process, Cooper Italic Swash, Flair Lined Caps, Oxford Italic, Holiday and Manhattan.

“Victor Borge . . . suggests that conversation could be improved with audible punctuation—with pops, hisses, whistles, clicks, ticks, crackles, bangs and squiggles audibly punctuating our everyday speech! But as his act ends and the applause and laughter fade away you begin to realize that Borge . . . made a good point when he followed the sentence ‘Was I an idiot’ with a bang and a squiggle. . . . How often have we felt that need!? Or when the query is of greater stress than the emphasis, why not reverse the signals?!”

—Edward Rondthaler, Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic, 1981.

“Art in letter form begins where geometry ends.”

—Paul Standard; quoted by Edward Rondthaler in Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic, 1981.

“Anybody can draw one letter; some people can draw two; but it takes a real designer to draw three.”

—Harry Payne; quoted by Edward Rondthaler in Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic, 1981.

“I look for unevenness, for letters that are over- or under-weight, for any inconsistencies that might flag the flavor. Every letter must be independently legible so that if it is seen out of context it will not be misread. Finally the entire alphabet must be ‘in tune.’. . .
    The oboe is the first instrument you hear when a symphony orchestra begins to ‘tune up.’ The oboe gives the pitch. It has great penetration and can easily be heard by all the other instruments. Now comes a surprising coincidence: the letters O B E in the word OBOE and the lowercase letters o b e —or preferably o d e —are, by the nature of their design, key letters that give the pitch to which other letters of the alphabet may be tuned. O B E and o d e carry a big load in determining the character of a style. They are not dramatic shapes like a or g or s, but they sound the pitch clearly. First they must be in tune with each other, then the remaining letters should be in design harmony or in artistic balance with these three. All must be in tune.”

—Edward Rondthaler, Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic, 1981.

“[I]f the alphabet is your hobby you’re in the best company of all: Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Gutenberg, King James, Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, A. Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Zapf, Eugene Ettenberg, Norman Cousins, Tom Wicker, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt too—all of them and many other greats have shown their expertise in using the alphabet superbly.”

—Edward Rondthaler, Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic, 1981.

Please enjoy for a few moments the luxurious lettering of a time gone by. . . . I noticed while I was assembling the previous post that my selections tended towards the cleaner, more ‘progressive’ international style that would come to prominence in the United States in the 1960s. This bolder and squarer modern style is actually rather scarce in the catalog, which, in general, fairly revels in the flair for frippery that the ’50s are famous for. So here’s a second helping of specimens from the same 1955 Photo-Lettering catalog.

These type specimens were gathered from an 18-page reproduction of a 1955 Photo-Lettering catalog in Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic by Edward Rondthaler, 1981. In 1955, as Ed puts it, ‘[p]hotographic lettering was still so new that many art directors were unaware of its potential or skeptical of its viability.’ Nevertheless, photo-typesetting proved to be that medium that carried a tradition of typographic excellence from the era of metal type into the digital age.

“‘Now, missis, she wanted me to do dis way, and she wanted me to do dat way; and finally I got kinder sarcy, and says I, “Now, missis, do jest look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em; and look at my great black stumpin’ hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlour?”’”

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.

“The symbol-making function is one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking, or moving about. It is the fundamental process of the mind, and goes on all the time.”

—Susanne K. Langer; quoted in Language in Thought & Action by S.I. Hayakawa, 1940.

“Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols.”

—Alfred Korzybski; quoted in Language in Thought & Action by S.I. Hayakawa, 1940.