In the last five years, my default has been Hoefler Text, though on the small-pixel screens I have to ask Microsoft Word to magnify the page by 125 percent in order for it to look right to me. Palatino was my font for a long time, but Apple uses it in its advertising, which ruined it in the end. Maybe its verticality reminded me of the font that the word Marlboro was printed in on the cigarette packages, whose seductively elongated lowercase “l” and “b” still make me wistful, after more than a decade of not smoking. I have a special abhorrence of squat, bubbly fonts, like whatever it is that the Library of America is typeset in, perhaps because my astigmatism makes such fonts look even pudgier than they actually are. New York was far from perfect-the serifs are too pronounced and give it a higgledy-piggledy look, and its round forms began to look a little too orotund after a while-so I went to Palatino when that was released. My goal has always been a legible font with a neutral personality, as appropriate to flower arranging as to triple homicides. But I soon turned against sans serif fonts, because they seemed hard to read. I was young then and more open to alternatives than I am now, so I was also willing at the time to try Geneva, which looked like an approximation of Helvetica. On my first Macintosh, which was the first Macintosh, my favorite was New York, which Apple seems to have invented as a very loose bitmap approximation of Times New Roman. Obsessing about fonts is a form of procrastination, so of course I have indulged in it ever since I graduated from a TRS-80 Model III to a Macintosh. When my printer dies, my beloved font will die as well.Ĭaleb Crain, author, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation It exists only on Hewlett-Packard #92286P, an obsolete font cartridge that plugs into an obsolete printer. I attempt to counter my natural tendency to overwrite by printing out my work in an aggressively foursquare version of Times Roman, one more heavily inked than Times New Roman or CG Times. I’d be afraid that my prose would become too precious, like that of a student of mine who, until nudged toward something more prosaic, refused to compose in anything but Garamond. Eaves interacted gracefully both in life and on the page.Although it’s a thrill to see my words printed in such elegant fonts, I’d never actually write in them. Eaves, a neo-letterpress font based on types by 18 th-century English printer John Baskerville and named after the woman who was first his housekeeper, then his mistress, then his wife. When I was the editor of the American Scholar, we set our text in New Baskerville and our titles in Mrs. Most of my books have been set in Walbaum, which sounds like a chain store but is in fact an early-19 th-century font designed by Justus Erich Walbaum, a German punchcutter whose luscious serifs may have been influenced by his early apprenticeship to a confectioner. My favorite fonts are unrepentantly anti-Helvetican. Anne Fadiman, author, At Large and At Small
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