A font of information
Happy 149th birthday to Frederic William Goudy. You may have never heard of him, but you see, and use, some variation of his work every day.
Goudy, born on March 8, 1865, in Bloomington, Illinois, developed more than a hundred fonts, including his most well-known Goudy Old Style.
According to Simon Garfield’s 2010 book, “Just My Type”, there are more than 100,000 fonts in the world. With that many fonts, the differences start to look pretty minor. When in doubt of the font, you can check the website (or app) called “What the Font”? The small case “g” is usually where most fonts reveal their true identity.
Font creators have little or no legal protections over their works in the United States. Courts have ruled the fonts are in the public domain, and therefore are not patentable.
The fonts can, however, be patented in Europe, but it is extremely costly do so. The artist would have to patent each glyph, which is font-speak for each letter and every symbol in the alphabet and on the keyboard, like the octothorpe (#), tilde (~), ampersand (&), and pilcrow (the paragraph break symbol, which looks like a P turned around). Each font has hundreds of these glyphs.
Garfield tells the history of fonts with humor and style. You may not remember, but there probably was a time when you wondered about fonts, perhaps the first time you saw so many of them listed in a drop down menu.
Fonts are fascinating stuff; they show up in our lives every day, in every book, email, sign, and advertisement we read.
The major distinction of fonts relates to whether they have a serif or not, in which they’re called sans serif. The serif is like a flat base at the bottom of certain letters, like the capital T, N, and R in this Times New Roman font. Serif fonts look more formal than sans serif.
This sentence, as you might have figured, is an example of a sans serif, in this case Futura Bk. Not surprisingly, the font used on the marker planted on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin in July 1969 was in Futura.
There’s no shortage of fonts now or centuries ago, from William Caslon’s typeset, used in the first mass-produced printing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to today’s ubiquitous Helvetica, on Washington DC and NYC subway signs, as well as on IRS tax forms.
Let’s take our serifs off for the artists who draw the fonts. We don’t hear much about them, but they’re out there, toiling over our p’s and q’s, and all the other glyphs we take for granted every day.
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Paul N. Herbert is the author of “The Jefferson Hotel: The History of a Richmond Landmark”, “Elinor Fry: A Legacy of Dance in Richmond”, and “God Knows All Your Names: Obscure Stories in American History.” He can be contacted at: .