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Who or what are Trilby, Allumi, Calluna, Giorgio, Leksa, and Catacumba?
a. Captains of vessels in the fleet of the early seventeenth-century Dutch adventurer Joris van Spilbergen.
b. Winning dogs in the hunting dog category at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.
c. Characters in a new Star Trek television series to be released next fall.
d. Other.
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The latest iteration of this hoary shtick comes to us via Pentagram. To play along, use the password CHARACTER.

Yesterday I showed some ancient inscribed letterforms from Ostia Antica. Today we flash forward some seventeen hundred years to this inscription over a gate in the Vatican complex, which is dated 1831.

Here is some handsome lettering from ruins at the ancient port city of Ostia, west of Rome. I don’t know what period this fragment dates to, although the age of Hadrian always seems to be a good guess.
For comparison, here’s a sample of the typeface Trajan (the movie font!), designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly [...]

A friend and colleague, Will Powers, died suddenly of a heart attack on August 25. I had worked with Will when I was at North Point Press, employing him as a free-lance copy editor and proofreader. He had worked previously as a typographer at Stinehour Press, and he brought a craftsman’s eye to the projects [...]

Ikea has used the geometric bauhausesque Futura (left above), designed by Paul Renner around 1925, as its signature font for some fifty years. It’s a font that emphasizes the Platonic essence of letterforms in an interesting way but provides little forward-momentum, so to speak, for extended reading.

Verdana (designed by Matthew Carter around the late 1990s, I think; at right above) is a more “humanist” (the letterforms to some degree evoke traditional Renaissance pen letterforms) font that was designed for use at small sizes on computer monitors. To this end it has a large x-height, large counters (openings), broad character widths, and other features that help to identify letters and tell similar ones apart at small sizes.

Yes, if Comic Sans (I know, I know, it’s not really a comic book font) has lost its appeal, you now have a wealth of alternatives from which to choose. If your idea of cool looks something like the sample above — who am I to judge? — you can find many many more at [...]

Right Reading was pleased to receive the following news brief via inter office mail from bittermelon:
Extra-Slanty Italics Introduced for Extremely Important Words
NEW HOPE, MN—In an attempt to address writers’ ever-growing word-emphasis needs, Minnesota-based Pica Foundry has developed a new, extra-slanty italic font, design director Jordan Soderblum announced Monday.
“When writing important words, authors too often bypass [...]

This site has been around, in various forms, for a long time. It began as an auxiliary to the Mercury House book publishing site that we put up in December 1994. At that time it was my personal page on the MH site, and so at first it developed a kind of resume-like structure, hints [...]

. . . and here the font aids and abets.

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via BuzzFeed (“I went to this store. It was a huge disappointment.”)
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A fellow called “the magic of chutney” sure knows how to dominate a board. Saying “Some of you is so down on fonts..I’m gonna get my man Johannes to break it down for ya,” he laid down a bunch of images like the one below. Great stuff (even if Gutenberg didn’t really invent moveable type).

Because this cannot be said often enough. From Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style:
In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice [...]

Elsewhere I mentioned recently that the David R. Godine blog has been a dispirited creature, with few and meager posts. I am happy to report that it has now been infused with new dedication and spark, and I am informed by both David Godine and Daniel Pritchard at the press that they are resolved to [...]

Jan Tschichold is one of the inescapable figures in twentieth-century typoraphy. This photo was taken in 1926. Richard Hollis has written an appreciation, called “Jan Tschichold: Titan of Typography,” in the Guardian. Although Hollis’s article does not attempt much analysis or evaluation of Tschichold’s work, it does present another angle of approach to one of [...]

“BALI” is a word that poses some problems typographically. The wide BA combination makes a lot of white space, while the LI tends to be narrow and sticklike. Furthermore, nobody seems to sure what kind of type connotes Bali. (You can confirm this by searching Amazon for books with “Bali” in the title — not [...]

This great photo is from a series by Andy Clymer devoted to Las Vegas’s Neon Beonyard, where neon signs go to die be preserved for posterity.
The Boneyard, according to Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, is “a project of the Neon Museum, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of one of the [...]

I wonder how old this ghost type is. Located on an old building in historic Sutter Creek in Amador County in California’s Sierra Nevada (the town takes its name from John A. Sutter, who owned the sawmill where gold was found in January 1848), it reads “Brignole Estate General Merchandise.”
According to a history of Amador [...]

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via Cosmopoetica
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The resourceful peacay at BibliOdyssey, who seems to spend most of his waking hours rummaging through the online archives of libraries and museums searching for scans from old books, has found another gem in Arte Subtilissima, por la Qual se Enseña a Escreuir Perfectamente (The most delicate art of teaching a perfect hand), 1550, by [...]

If you’re anywhere around North Andover, MA, you might want to check these out. The sale runs through August 28.
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