Notes on the type

Back in 1997 the New Yorker published a piece lampooning the proliferation of ‘Notes on the Type’ — those oleaginous mini-essays informing us that ‘this book was set in Backslap Grotesque Italic Semi-Detached, a variant of Bangalore Torpedo Moribund adapted in 1867 from a matrice by the Danish chiseller Espy Sans, a character if ever there was one’.

In the years since, the situation has gone from worrying to insufferable. Many non-fiction books now suffer from a severe case of distended colophon — sentence after rococo sentence, in the best M&S chocolate-box language, on the lineage of the type and typographer, on the amusing top notes of blueberry and persimmon that can be detected in the prose. I recently read one that explained not just who invented the font, but who was long thought to have invented it, before concluding: ‘The type is an excellent example of the influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon developed his own incomparable designs from them.’ But if Caslon’s are incomparable, why not use them instead?

All this verbiage is meant to assure you of two things. The first is that the text is part of the great chain of ideas that stretches back through the ages. The colophon in my own recent book, set in the delightful Bembo, invokes Aldus Manutius, Francesco Griffo, Cardinal Bembo’s De Aetna and Claude Garamond’s Romain de l’Université. I doubt any of my readers could point out Claude Garamond in a line-up, let alone Aldus Manutius. But it gets the point across: people have been saying clever things in Bembo for centuries, and therefore anything written in Bembo is clever.

More importantly, as with organic coffee or single-origin chocolate, you’re being reassured that what you possess is a luxury good.