The Meaning of Everything.

Just finished reading The Meaning of Everything – The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. Crammed with a cast of larger-than-life characters and overflowing with drama, intrigue and political machinations, it really was a cracking read. Not the book for everyone, though, if the man I met at a party yesterday is anyone to judge by. After recovering from his shock that such a book existed – and that anyone would want to read it even if it did – he told me it had been nice to meet me and excused himself to get another drink. Bunch of savages in this town.

The book is mostly focussed on the content of the dictionary, the story of the words themselves, but no chronicle of the dictionary would be complete without reference to the type:

The book is laid out in three columns, each essentially ten inches tall and two-and-a-half inches wide. The body type is a classic British Imperial-era face called Clarendon, which had been designed and the punches cut in 1845 by Benjamin Fox for Robert Besley at London's renowned Fann Street Foundry: it used boldface for the headwords, and then a variety of styles (light and italic among them) and a variety of fount sizes for the various elements that [the editor, John] Murray decided required illustration. The definitions are set in Old Style; the quotations in a smaller fount size of the same.

I've always had a soft spot for Clarendon. I think it's a dependable face, with surprising versatility. When auditioning fonts for a new job I'll often bring Clarendon out onto stage, just for a look, and I'm often pleased with how it performs. May pass in the end, but it's always worth a look.

It was a footnote to the text quoted above, however, that really caught my eye:

Robert Bringhurst, an authority of typography, says that the suite of Clarendon faces 'reflect the hearty, stolid, bland, unstoppable aspects of the British Empire. They lack cultivation, but they also lack menace and guile. They squint and stand their ground, but they do not glare.'

That simply is one of the finest descriptions of a typeface I've ever read. I love it. It shows how type is so much more than mere marks on a page; it lives, it breathes, its character speaks with a voice all its own.

A favourite application of Clarendon is on the many street signs in South Melbourne for Clarendon St. Total coincidence, of course, as all the street signs down there use Clarendon. Well, did. I think. When I ventured down to get a shot for this post, the only street signs I could find used either Saa Series C, (commonly used around Australia for highway signage):


... or the ever contentious Gill Sans.


I was sure I wasn't making the street signs up though, as it was quite a distinct memory. I wandered the streets hoping to find a lone survivor, overlooked and tucked away down an alley or something. I noticed South Melbourne market was covered in Clarendon, and that gave me hope. But instead of searching the skies for a sign, I should have been looking a little closer to the ground. Dotted around the intersections along Clarendon St are these handy way-finding installations...


...err, bins, and it was there that my Clarendon-Clarendon connection lived on. Good to see that though change may have come to the signs of South Melbourne, true to its character, Clarendon stood its ground. Long may it be so.

UPDATE
A FontFeed post from a little while back linked to a Flickr pool called 'LTypI: Lack of Typo­graphic Imagination' which collects logos where the name is reflected in the choice of type. I wouldn't go so far as labelling them unimaginative as I think it's coincidence more often than not, and besides, I quite enjoy the type-nerd in-jokes. :)

UPDATE 2
Speaking of fonts having character, as a follow-up to their Font Conference video, College Humor have just released Font Fight. Not bad, although I question their portrayal of Helvetica. She's all spunky and casual, and anything but the middle-aged scientist in a white lab coat that I would have imagined. Oh well, make my own damn movie, then, I guess? :)