John Holbo

Even Kevin Drum is getting into the game, reading this NY Times piece about type purists. [click to continue…]

My friend Josh Glenn, and his collaborator Rob Walker, have been running an interesting project: Significant Objects. I’ll quote from the project info page:

THE IDEA

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! [click to continue…]

For the next several hours [sorry, you’re too late] Amazon has all four of the Eccleston/Tennant Doctor Who seasons for sale at a reasonable price; that is, 60% off the usual, quite absurd price. Last year my brother-in-law bought me the first series for X-Mas and I enjoyed it. But I’ve been unwilling to shell out $80 a season to find out what happened next. What am I? An idiot? Now that’s fixed.

Please feel free to argue about who the best doctor was/is.

Free MP3 for the night (via Stereogum): Pearl Harbor, “California Shakedown”. Sort of … I dunno, droney-droney-drone.

Gotta change things up, keep things fresh. This video is fantastic and highly educational. It teaches you how to whittle your own 19th Century dictionary, using only string, a turnip, and a clamp. But first you have to make your own Linotype machine. It’s much easier to go here and just win one of these beautiful artifacts of book artistry. (You will have to be lucky, however.) [click to continue…]

Robin Kinross – who knows more about Tschichold than I – showed up in comments to my Tschichold post to object that the book I said was pretty good is actually a shameful mess. [click to continue…]

But I’m never going to read a long post on typography and philosophy, you object. There’s life! The whole world awaits me! Well, alright. Just look at this, then.

My colleague Axel Gelfert just launched a bold book review-type literary thing, The Berlin Review of Books. And he kindly invited me to review a big fat book, Jan Tschichold: Master Typographer: His Life, Work and Legacy [amazon], for his grand opening. So here is my review. It’s a long one. My main pivot is around one quote from the master, from 1959:

In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable … Good typography has to be perfectly legible and, as such, the result of intelligent planning … The classical typefaces such as Garamond, Janson, Baskerville, and Bell are undoubtedly the most legible. In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel’s infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.

You don’t have to go back into the 19th Century to find those dark depths, you know. Marvel did swimsuit issues in the 90’s. Start here. Here is another set.

So, which page is your favorite and why? (Defend your answer.) I’m partial to the Escher-like quality of Thunderstrike’s – what is it? I guess you could describe what we are seeing here as a cross between a deltoid and a mobius strip. Or between a pectoral and a tesseract?

In short: where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop. But perhaps you prefer the Doctor Strange pin-up in which the good doctor is – well, how tall would you say he looks to be?

via War Rocket Ajax

I snagged another good comics history recently. A History of American Graphic Humor, vol. 2: 1865-1938 (1938), by William Murrel. (You could get it through Abebooks; but I bought the last cheap copy. Sorry.) They sure liked to make fun of Oscar Wilde, back in the day. [click to continue…]

Following up this post, here’s the way to do the scan-and-OCR thing (if you are a mac user). [click to continue…]

I have a coincidence to report. This morning, right before Kieran’s post went up, I was scanning (see this post, concerning my new hobby) selections from Russell Lynes’ classic essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow”, the inspiration for the Life chart on brows. Here is how Lynes tells the story in a (1979) afterword to his book, The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste [amazon], which is an out-of-print minor classic, if you ask me. [click to continue…]

Amazon is giving away a whole Philip Glass album: The Orange Mountain Music Vol.I. I’m really, really enjoying it. On the other hand, I’m using it as background music for scanning and doing itsby bitsy Photoshop stuff. It goes up and down and up and down and my hand goes up and down and up and down, and etc., and we seem to be getting on together. When I was in college I hated Philip Glass. I paid a lot for a ticket to a concert, without knowing what I was in for. I was bitterly disappointed. What do you think of the man? Give the album a try, if you are a skeptic.

I got my hands on a pretty good old book, Cartoon Cavalcade (1943) – and if you got your hands on it too, you wouldn’t pay more’n a few dollars for the privilege, my friend. It’s an anthology of American cartoons from the 1880’s to the 1940’s: 450 pages worth, plus editorial matter from the early 40’s, providing a historically interesting perspective on all this history. Following up this much-commented post of mine, I’ll post a Reginald Marsh item from 1934: [click to continue…]

Steve Benen ponders John Boehner on hate crimes: “The Democrats’ ‘thought crimes’ legislation … places a higher value on some lives than others. Republicans believe that all lives are created equal, and should be defended with equal vigilance.” Benen: “if Boehner doesn’t want to consider the circumstances behind a violent crime, and doesn’t want to pursue “thought crimes,” then he’d necessarily reject the rationale behind every hate-crime law, right?” Benen goes on to note that, apparently, Boehner does not. He “supports existing federal protections … based on immutable characteristics.” Which Boehner thinks include religion, but not sexual orientation. Who knew?

There is, I think, an even more basic problem, which is theoretically interesting, which I would certainly like to see used to swat down Boehner-style arguments, and which I’ve never actually seen anyone make (but probably I just missed it). Practically all crime is ‘thought crime’ in the good ol’ common law sense of the Latin phrase actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – ‘the act does not make guilt unless the mind be guilty.’ If we were to take a strict liability approach to all violent crime we would be obliged to place wrongful death on a par with premeditated murder. (After all, it’s not as though the lives of those killed accidentally are worth less.)

This refutes the notion that there is something sinister and Orwellian about post-Drakonic/post-Hammurabian developments in criminal law. (Damn liberals and their newfangled political correctness!) It doesn’t follow that ‘hate crime’ legislation makes moral and practical sense, of course. We could have that discussion after Boehner is done looking up ‘immutable’ in the dictionary.