What few recognize is that such value-signaling has gone beyond the realm of aesthetic appearances and into the arena of behavioral valuation itself. Just as the script of hand-copied Bibles in the Middle Ages clearly represented the “divine perfection” of its contents and values, so today have fonts become tools of cultural conditioning.

Has this guy ever seen a "hand-copied Bible" from the Middle Ages? Does he have any idea of a) how many cows or sheep or goats it would take? b) ever really looked at the text of even, say, the Gospels in ms.?

Sure Kells is pretty to look at, but the text is less than accurate, from any point of view. Lines dropped, verses skipped, verses repeated. And let's not talk about the basic grammar and copy errors, the ones any scribe could make. Half the glosses in the earliest Irish and Latin gospel texts are corrections because the main text difficult to read, semantically and visually.

and

"What do you kids think you're doing?"
"Mom says it's okay to smash windows with Arnold Bocklin on them."
"Yeah, but what she really hates is Stop. I don't think she'd mind if we burned down a whole building that had Stop on the facade."
"She's right. Stop sucks."
"Well, what Mom says is that it paralyzes our aspirations toward a less complex and more manageable future into a retrograde image of a reactionary pseudo-progress. Also that it keeps the escha-whatsit from being immanemtifazized."

I wish more publishers would include them--and include the book designer's name, too. I really want to know who the designer was, and sometimes I see a new face that I really can't identify.

Oh, and we should bring back the anathmea and the generic copyright curse too.

Good times . . .

(Please let me know if you'd rather not have meta-comments such as this in the comment thread.)

(The above is, of course, a poor attempt to contribute something on-topic.)

http://www.cheshiredave.com/mastication/2002/07/0037a-btt.html

"Well, what Mom says is that it paralyzes our aspirations toward a less complex and more manageable future into a retrograde image of a reactionary pseudo-progress. Also that it keeps the escha-whatsit from being immanemtifazized."

My brain just exploded, and I think I love you. And you owe me a keyboard.

Wow. I don't think he knows anything about photography either.

They then proceeded to put signs on all the doors, according to University Policy.

Each door bore a carefully printed label naming a place in Middle-earth.

In Tengwar.

I began to realize that it has been too long since I heard Buckley's voice, and I can't really pull it up -- except for the breathy quality of it.

So I had to keep reading it with the fake Buckley-voice with one part of my brain, while another part listened to the voice and tried to figure out whose it was.

Ah, James Mason.

This voice thing: is it a mental auditory font?

Thanks for the link to a good article.

Avram: "Wow. I don't think he knows anything about photography either."

You don't need computer equipment to lie with a camera. For example, a newspaper or magazine photographer can take a photo of 60ish politician and, using light and shadow alone, make him appear to be either a robust and manly figure, or a frail, elderly wisp nearing death. And the photographer can do it with a conventional chemical camera.

Goldie Hawn looks just fabulous when we see her on TV escorting her daughter, Kate Hudson, to the Academy Awards, they look like they could be sisters. I recently saw a candid photograph of her in some newspaper or on some Web site, and she looked in that photo more like the person she actually is: a 60-year-old woman who did a lot of hard partying in the 60s and 70s. (Still looked great, though.)

Nope. To quote Betsy Ross by way of Stan Freberg, everybody wants to be an art director.

10. Klingon.

9. That Dr. Bronner -- you just gotta read that, it's amazing.

8. Like the iPod name, only, you know, our product.

7. That cool barbarian thing that has little crosses in all the "O"s.

6. Will it look good on my Blackberry?

5. I never have any trouble finding the D train uptown. Can we talk to Bloomberg about that?

4. Anything, as long as it crawls up into space with loud music.

3. I've got this CD-ROM my kid bought -- jeez, it's got a million of the things.

2. This guy I know talks about something called "katakana." I hear it's big.

1. Why do you want to put words on it?

Helvetical Narrow Condensed
Frutiger 66
Poplar
Ironwood

There were many more, each set in the named face. Browsing the rack was almost like flipping through an Adobe type catalogue. I should've bought a bunch, got my students to model them, and made a series of type specimen postcards. Oh, the joys of hindsight.

Though a quick search of their site turned up Eurostile for 500 yen, so maybe I still have a chance.

DIN 1451, Frutiger 66 Bold Italic, Metroblack, Eurostile, Harlow, FUTURA, IRONWOOD, Crillee

I stand self-corrected. But I still have vague memories of a Trade Gothic shirt, as well a Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch. Unfortunately, the link on the above page to the photos on the Uniqlo site no longer works, instead showing this year's lineup.

Aren't they those angel things on the corners of the Ark of the Covenant, to make its edges easier for the eye to discern? Important because if you touch the thing you, you know, die.

Xopher: or you just get shocked and swear a lot (Mythbusters, when they hooked the electric fence transformer up to their "Ark" instead of the Babylon batteries).

And if you're wearing metal it gets, hrm, ark-welded together...I ask no forgiveness for that. I know there can be none.

(I remember a running battle with a High End Designer, in the days before computer typesetting; I was running an evening program, and he insisted on using some handsome sans serif face which was swell for display or headline use, but utterly illegible when set, in orange on white, no less, tightly leaded in 9 point type. Designer was much loved by the head of the department, and I was a mere underling whose opinions on type design were not heeded.)

The mob--those who cared enough to potch around with fonts--have either become disenchanted and gone on to other things, or have wised up. Poulous sounds like a kid sulking because someone else has the same toys he has.

Ah, shucks, ma'am. I'd've thought you'd have outed me by now, knowing how you know me and my writing style.

I couldn't resist when I saw the article (found it via Billmon's link last night). I was ... restrained. Conservative. Factual. I'm rather proud of myself for not writing what was going through my mind, which ran something along these lines:

"What the...? WHAT THE...? Decadent WHAT??!! Christ on a crutch, just kill me now. Idiots. They're all idiots..." (then mutterings about machine guns ensued)

Keith, are you being cute, or are by some odd chance unaware of the typographical significance of "dingbat"?