Types

I'm afraid I'm still entertaining a mild obsession with fonts, ever since reading Simon Garfield's marvellous book 'Just My Type' a couple of weeks ago and then making a little trip to the second floor of the Central Library for a bit of research. I can't be alone in finding some of the descriptions of these little practical works of art as poetic as the things they describe are beautiful. Here's Garfield's description of Mr Eaves, for example: " a Baskerville type without the serifs, but still linked to the eighteenth century through its quill-tailed Q, strident R, and the cat-tailed lower bowl of its g, the letters airily spaced and crisp." The central font in this picture is Venus (Bauer 1907-1927), which, according to 'The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces', is "a lineale which looks, in the upper case, like a revival of a nineteenth-century type", 'Lineale', apparently, being the more recent term for a sans serif.