Barack Obama, Amy Winehouse, and a typographic rebel

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Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

Simon Garfield

A good typeface can change your life. When the award-winning Simon Garfield started writing this book, several type aficionados warned him that he’d never be able to walk past a shop front again without wanting to identify the typeface, and not rest until he’d solved the dilemma. Just My Type is much more than merely a book about typefaces, or ‘fonts’, but is a fascinating, and slightly eccentric journey, exploring the histories and idiosyncratic byways of type in all its different shapes.

In Garfield’s eyes typefaces are not just clinical tools to express verbal messages, rather they are regarded with the same feelings of love, hate or plain indifference that most of us reserve for people. But then typefaces are a bit like people; fonts (alphabets of a particular typeface), are made up of ‘characters’ (individual letters), their different ‘weights’ – light, medium, bold – are part of a type ‘family’. And that’s why the type stories that comprise this volume – about why, for instance, Barack Obama opted for a face called Gotham, or why Amy Winehouse found her soul in 1930s Art Deco – are so readable. Our choice of type says as much about us as our choice of clothes, car or even our friends. There are also stories about the great originators of typefaces as well, from Baskerville to Zapf, and type gurus such as Neville Brody (designer of The Face magazine), a typographic rebel who threw out the rulebook.

The face Gill Sans isn’t treated just like any other typeface, but as the passionate creation of the celebrated Eric Gill, famous for his engravings in wood and stone. This elegant ‘sans serif’ font (a typeface minus the ‘serifs’ that top-and-tail letterforms such as the one you are reading now), began to take shape when Gill was living in Wales in the mid-1920s, where he sketched out some sans serif forms in his notebook. A friend of Gill’s asked him to design a shop front for his Bristol bookshop, and the wooden sign over the door was Gill Sans’ first outing into the world. Its influence was immediate and lasting, being adopted by the BBC, the Church of England and for use on those now-famous Penguin book covers. Gill went on to design a further 12 typefaces, including Joanna, named after his youngest daughter.

Cooper Black, a once-neglected face from the 1920s, has recently been revived by its use as the easyJet corporate typeface of choice, and can be seen at 30,000 feet, super-sized, on the sides and tail of their fleet aircraft. Garfield describes its chunky, compact appearance as looking like ‘the shape the oils in a lava lamp would form if smashed to the floor’. The overall verdict? Great for headlines owing to its readability, but not very legible in small sizes: a typeface made to be seen rather than read.

Other nuggets include stories about the typefaces that name and number the backs of football shirts (Antique Olive, Univers and ITC Bauhaus), making a formidable strike force, while Hector Guimard’s quintessentially Parisian Métro signage lettering enchants with its romantic, fin-de-siécle art nouveau swirls. Baskerville is one of Garfield’s (and my) favourites. This stylish classic face was designed in the 18^th century by John Baskerville, a Birmingham engineer regarded today as an obsessive genius of type who confessed that: ‘Among the several mechanic Arts that have engaged my attention there is none which I have pursued with so much steadiness and pleasure as that of Letter Founding’. Amazingly, it seems that despite his gift for type design Baskerville ‘could not spell well’. A wider recognition of his work was to come in April 2000, when the Baskerville typeface was selected as one of the five initial typefaces for the Apple iPad.

            The strength of this book undoubtedly lies in Garfield’s talent as a storyteller, its charming vignettes and anecdotes transforming a potentially dry subject into a visually striking and engrossing narrative. If there is an overall argument that strings the whole of the book together it lies in the author’s awareness that though typefaces are ubiquitous today and thus could be taken for granted, they nevertheless, through their individuality, affect our perceptions of the world – of our books, computers, favourite products and the very public spaces we all share. The book is very much aimed at the non-specialist who wants an entertaining and informative read.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts  by Simon Garfield is published by Profiles Publishing, 352 pp. Illustrated in black & white. ISBN: 978-1846683015