Type : Writing
Typographic glyphs have their moments. The @ symbol was barely used before it became indispensable for email and social media. The creation of the single European currency saw thousands of fonts being reissued to include € at the turn of the century. It’s likely that some crypto-boosters are hoping this will happen again, and the [ ]
A as was changed in the 1997 redesign of the London Review of Books. There were no editorial innovations: the table of contents remained undifferentiated, giving the same emphasis to contributions be they book reviews, essays or poems. The Caslon masthead stayed, as did the four-column layout, itself indebted to, if not precisely inherited from, [ ]
L, printing has generated jargon, which like water will find its way. Some terms which have dripped into the wider language have thrived with their new metaphorical meanings, while withering in the business they came from. Two words expressive of banality have their origins in the printing office. Coined by the Parisian printer Firmin Didot, [ ]
P with the nationality of the word’s origin, is known in English by its blunt translation as ‘Swedish Death Cleaning’. This is the practice of dealing with the material detritus of our lives while we still can. Upon entering, say, our eighth decade, we should start emptying attics, closets and basements of clutter. It is [ ]
O bank holiday weekends the seaside soundscape of Brighton – surf-on-shingle, raucous herring gulls – is augmented by the rackety putt-putt of two-stroke engines. The city remains one of the prime rallying destinations of , and they have been rolling into town on their scooters for well over half a century. Once, their arrival, along [ ]
M in their edgelands or less invigilated central areas, are now home to streets where almost every vertical surface is either, depending upon one s outlook, adorned with street art or marred by vandalism. One such, in Brighton, is Trafalgar Lane, an alley just to the south-east of the train station’s undercroft. Along its 100 metre [ ]
A series of pictures of more than century-spanning ghost signs, posted on Instagram this week, prompts me to unearth a more contemporary and prosaic selection of my own. Unlike most of Rawsthorn’s, these are too recent to have accrued any antique charm and are not destined to haunt for long: less ghosts than zombies, awaiting [ ]
N with the status of a classic, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) wasn’t universally admired when it was first released. Pauline Kael described the adaptation of William Makepeace Thackarey’s novel as ‘a mistake’. In her review for the New Yorker she wrote: ‘It’s a coffee table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour [ ]
T of typefaces, once a form of attitudinising mostly confined to printers, designers and typographers, has been democratised by the font menus on our computers. After decades of being a mark of respectable authority , made too familiar by being among the earliest digital typefaces, is now widely derided as stuffy and overdue retirement. is [ ]
A a narrowboat on a British canal, and a racing shell crewed by an eight would not be mistaken for one another, but beyond the aquatic obvious, they have in common a length of about 20 metres. Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984) and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) [ ]