Medieval scribes prided themselves on the intricacy of their alphabets. “Only a writer with nothing to say should find himself distracted by the letters in which he says it.”įont doesn’t have to be invisible, though. “The relation between a poem and its font is often neurotic fixation,” he wrote to me in an elegant fifteen-point Constantia. “Don’t restate the obvious.” “Bring the margins into the design.” “Bring the design into the margins.” “Mark the reader’s way.”īut Bringhurst draws a bright line between graphic design and writing a poem. “Allow the face to speak in its natural idiom,” he writes. Like an expert sommelier, Bringhurst demonstrates how font functions and how it should be paired with content. White’s famous grammar manual it’s now in its fourth edition. In 1992, Robert Bringhurst, an accomplished Canadian poet and typographer, published The Elements of Typographic Style, a history and style guide modeled on William Strunk and E. When one poet finally broke the cycle and submitted work in fourteen-point Verdana, it felt like he’d plopped a highway billboard inside the Oxford English Dictionary. One semester, we gradually started using smaller and smaller typefaces: eleven-point, then ten, then nine, disappearing into the page. Another persisted in stoic, twelve-point Times New Roman as she put it, Anything else seemed like putting a dress on top of a dress. One poet arranged her tiny capital letters in text boxes, adjusting the serifs for every stanza. A font subculture spread among the poets. To make a paper longer, change the spaces to size fourteen make the punctuation thinner to squeeze more into the page.Īt the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, things changed again. Font manipulation became a tool to avoid real editing. I chafed at this restriction, but a true typographical enthusiast finds ways to express her creativity. In college, my writing was corralled into twelve-point Times New Roman, regardless of how beautiful it might have been in Hoefler Text. The dystopian soap opera could only be in Geneva surrealist time travel, Book Antiqua. For every story or poem I started to write, I first spent hours choosing the font. On Microsoft Word I’d lovingly scroll through the drop-down font menu: Avenir Book, Baskerville, Goudy, Goudy Old Style.
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January 2023
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