A note on the type
In a post on his Paper Cuts blog a couple days back, New York Times Book Review staffer Dwight Garner has some fun with the overly pretentious “note on the type” pages that appear in the back of some books:
I’m sitting here, for example, with an advance edition of Orhan Pamuk’s forthcoming book Other Colors: Essays and a Story, to be published in September by Knopf. At the back, the “Note on the Type” tells us: “The text of this book was set in a typeface called Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison (1889-1967) for The Times (London) and first introduced by that newspaper in 1932.”
Okay so far.
But did Knopf need to add that Stanley Morison was considered “a writer of sensibility, erudition, and keen practical sense”?
Garner also points to Stacey Grenrock Woods’ new memoir, I, California, which “ends not with a note on the type but a note to what seems to be the text’s petsitter.” The note is reproduced in full in Garner’s post.
Quillblog, for the record, is set in Georgia, which, according to this Wikipedia entry, was designed by Matthew Carter “for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes, partially due to a relatively large x-height.” No word on Carter’s erudition or sensibility, but we’ll look into it.
And I know of a recent book from a small publisher set in Adobe Minion by Simon Garamond, a bit of pseudonymity that tributes what Wikipedia calls “a group of old style serif typefaces named for the punch-cutter Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561).”
Or maybe it’s just a comment on the Canadian publishing world today when small publishers have to be editors and typesetters too. Wikidictionary defines “minion” as “a syncophantic follower,” and sometimes they may have to be that too, I’m told.
Cheers
Mary
I know of this Simon Garamond, he set two of my books. Over the years, like Dwight Garner, I have been watchful of the aforementioned overly pretentious ‘notes on the type’ indigenous to the back pages of books.
A stanza in my poem about front matter and end matter, called Monograph (from Hurt Thyself, MQUP, 2005), reads as follows:
Late on, an earnest Note About The Type
is a welcome touch. It bespeaks tradition,
the publisher’s sense of modesty,
and adds some ballast below
the blurb, the volumes of un-weighed hype,
regarding this book set:
in Baskerville (by horse-drawn chariot),
in Franklin Gothic (using heritage commission funds),
rarely, in Haettenschweiller (the sadomasochistic heroine).
- Oi!
Andrew