I don’t arrive at my camp site until 11pm, partly as a result of my own sense of comic timing, partly the result of a long lunch with Dear Mary and chums. Good fortune would have it that Spectator HQ has been pitched next to Radio Cymru’s weather reader, who tells us in the morning that it will be fine today and even hotter tomorrow. So far so good.
First on my extensive program of literary delights comes Simon Garfield, talking about his wildly entertaining book Just my Type. The lecture proved so popular it was bumped up two spots to the much larger Oxfam stage. Wearing a ‘Sex Drugs and Helvetica Bold’ T-Shirt, he opened with a warning that he will not be discussing the similarly titled romantic novel published in the same year, and before everyone has the chance to leave, launches into his unlikely defence of Comic Sans. “The thing about Comic Saaaans is that it is very reeeeaaaadable.” said Garfield in an unusual stammer which appears to have a stammer of its own.
Using the iconic designs of Margaret Calvert’s road signs and the Gotham font that established the strength of the Obama brand, Garfield showed how deeply fonts permeate our consciousness.
Did you know, for example, that in reaction to Roman font, the Nazis treated traditional blackletter fonts as a symbol of German strength and superiority, until their illegibility and lack of availability in the type foundries of occupied territory led to their banning as a Jewish invention?
Spectator readers will doubtless take satisfaction from the fact that the New Statesman uses a slightly larger and rounder typeface than the Spec.
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