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Category Archives: book review

Just My Type

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Now, seeing that pangram (and related but unrelated video) what font does this blog use?

I recently finished Just My Type by Simon Garfield.  It’s a rather interesting history and development on the fonts we use today.  Prior to reading this book, I never really thought much about all the different typefaces we have.  I would just choose one that suited me in what I was trying to accomplish and that was the end of it.  But there is so much history behind each font.  It’s kind of amazing.

The beginnings of fonts can be traced back to Gutenberg.  It makes sense if you think about it.  Before then, books were generally produced by a scribe painstakingly hand copying the original.  Books were obviously relatively rare.  Gutenberg changed that with his press and moveable type.  He gave us our first font, Textura.

I never realized how much effort needs to go into designing a font.  Looking at the list of fonts I have on my computer, I would think that pretty much every possible font has been designed already.  Indeed, this is a problem that type designers face today, how to make sure they aren’t recycling something old.  But I looked at some of the newer typefaces we have today and I can’t honestly see how they’re so different from an older one.   Sure, the bowl of the g is slightly rounder than the old font, but does that really mean that this is a completely new font?  I guess I just don’t have the eye for fonts like the type designers, or even the author of this book.  I was really amused with the different adjectives he used to describe fonts.  Fonts can be described as “colorful” or “imaginative.”  Some are “consistently beautiful.”  These are not words I think of when I look at different typefaces.  Theirs is definitely a different world.

Anyway, if you’re curious about the fonts you see around you, I suggest reading the book.  It has a rather light-hearted tone and easy to read.  You’ll learn a lot about fonts.

My Life, Deleted

No, not my life.  It’s the title to Scott Bolzan‘s memoir he wrote after a traumatic brain injury in 2008 about his subsequent recovery.  And yes, this means this post is one of those rare book reviews.

Scott Bolzan, former NFL and USFL player, former successful businessman, former pilot, had an accident in which he slipped and hit his head.  He now suffers from one of the more severe cases of retrograde amnesia in medical history in that even now, his memory has not returned.  So, since then he’s had to relearn many things, like who his wife and children are, and even what a wife is.  His memoir is a rather inspirational story of relearning what it is to be himself and how to be himself after 40 some odd years of his past experiences were taken from him.

It’s a pretty good book and an easy read, as most memoirs are; I finished it in a few hours.  It gives an interesting view on human relationships as Mr. Bolzan had to (re)learn how to be around all his old friends and relatives much like a child.  But unlike a child, he has coherent, well-formed thoughts about these situations and can express them much better.  It’s very interesting insight into that whole process.  It also rekindles my old interest in psychology.  The brain is a fragile and mysterious thing and yet it commands so much of our daily lives.

We should probably all wear helmets all the time.