Simon Garfield

A North American edition of an internationally best-selling work by the award-winning author of The Cheese Monkeys documents the history of typefaces from the early days of Gutenberg to the modern applications of digital fonts, tracing the impact of font usage in business and pop culture while explaining what favorite fonts reveal about personality.

A Book about Fonts

Just My Type

High Fidelity

Comic Sans is type that has gone wrong. It was designed with strict intentions by a professional man with a solid philosophical grounding in graphic arts, and it was unleashed upon the world with a kind heart. It was never intended to cause revulsion or loathing, much less end up (as it has) on the side of an ambulance or a gravestone. It was intended to be fun. And, oddly enough, it was never intended to be a typeface at all.

In many ways, Comic Sans existed before Connare made it legitimate by giving it a name. It existed, naturally enough, in comics and comic books (indeed the typeface was originally called Comic Book).

Upper and lower case? The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor’s hands before they were used to form a word– the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn.

The world’s first font– Gutenberg’s Textura

In fact, Gill designed twelve other typefaces, including the popular classical serifs Perpetua and Joanna, as well as Felicity, Solus, Golden Cockerel, Aries, Jubilee and Bunyan.

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