Colophon: A Love Story

I have been fascinated by letters, typed or written, for as long as I can remember. I carved an alphabet into the side of the kitchen cabinets with a broken zipper one winter day when I was five or so. I was fascinated by the page numbers in A Boy's History of the World - what I would discover fifteen years later were a hallmark of good typography, "old style" or "non-lining" figures, now painfully scarce in publishing.

I would spend hours drawing letters: the circus-style lettering found on my Red Sox pennant, the neonesque numbers on the Blue Jays' uniforms, Superman's and Batman's logos, bubble letters that I saw my older cousin drawing. (I later got unexpected respect from some homeboys in sixth grade when these letters were in vogue for graffiti lettering.) I would come up with anything random to use the typewriter for, I so loved to make the little black marks come out on the paper.

My fate was sealed with the gift of a calligraphy set for my tenth birthday. It's all been downhill from there; spending hours lettering posters for high school presentations, designing flyers for the Fraternity, obsessing over the fonts in my college papers. When I learned TeX and LaTeX, I began to get a hint of finer typography; I started obsessing over ligatures and proper use of dashes in Microsoft Word. Times Roman was still the font of choice, though many "real" typographers regard it as a bourgeois font; Hermann Zapf's Palatino is far nicer, but I couldn't bear to use the same face as the Brown Daily Herald. The exposure continued to grow when I stumbled into a job for an electronic publishing software company. That software was too coarse to do fine typography, but I continued to learn on my own time and from my co-workers, including the editors of the International Standard for typographic layout. I started work on a typeface for a literary magazine that Ellie wants to publish.

I spend meetings at work drawing alphabets. Fanciful Latin ones, Greek and Cyrillic letterforms; wondering when I'll get around to learning to draw kanji, or figure out Arabic. (There is a coffeehouse in Harvard Square called Morocco; it has one of the most beautiful works of lettering I have ever seen. It is the gorgeously intricate traditional Arabic meditative calligraphy, but carved in multiple layers of wood.)

I had the joy of producing my first semi-professional lettering work as a wedding gift for two friends: the grace from the music camp where they met, blacklettered below medieval musical notation. Next, I'd like to try that meditative Arabic style with Latin scripture, just to see if it's feasible. Latin letterforms may prove to be less subject to interpretation than the Arabic, but I will certainly enjoy the experience.

I bought and read Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, an exemplar in the tradition of Strunk & White; a beautiful book to look at, let alone read. Anyone even peripherally interested in type should read it, and especially so anyone who thinks a copy of any "desktop publishing" software makes him a typesetter.

Now I work for a publisher, and have the chance to help make the little black marks in books shipped around the world. I also have the chance to help influence the design of the books, but only minimally. This compilation has really been my first chance to design an entire work from the ground up.

I've endeavored to alter the content as little as possible. I've fixed a few obvious spelling errors, but left the authors' words alone as much as possible. I've scrutinized everything a few times over, but undoubtedly I'll discover errors as soon as the ink dries.

This was typeset entirely in OzTeX, a shareware implementation for the Macintosh of Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting system.

The pages are six by nine inches; the two to three ratio is a musical perfect fifth, a ratio often used by Renaissance typesetters. The body text fits in a "tall pentagon" ratio, approximately 1 to 1.701; the two ratios were inspired by Aldus Manutius's printing of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a very influential piece of typography from 1499. The left and right margins are even, though Renaissance typographers preferred the older scribal form of wide outer margins and narrow inner ones.

The typeface is Linotype-Hell's New Caledonia, a modern digital revival of Scotch Roman, the definitive typeface of the 1840s. (Apparently the Scottish were very influential on typography in the early nineteenth century.) So it, like St. Anthony Hall, is a modern incarnation of a 150-year-old entity.