an almighty question mark
“Ted did not feel like being teased. He reminded me that it was this day in the month before, on April 22nd, that the white wake of the Great Comet was first seen in the east, thirty degrees above the horizon, with its scorpion tail that curled across the heavens like an almighty question mark. That question mark set our preacher a-howling about the eternal War between Good and Evil, and how that scorpion tail was the first sign of Armageddon.”
—Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country, 2008.
Michel Polnareff
Jeff Beck – Nadia
the typeface called Janson
“[M]y first novel, The Poorhouse Fair . . . fell into the hands of Harry Ford, a perfect knight of the print world, an editor and designer both, who gave me a delicious striped jacket and an elegant page format, in the typeface called Janson, that I have stuck with for over forty books since. To see those youthful willful hopeful words of mine in that type, with Perpetua chapter heads set off by tapered rules, was an elevated moment I am still dizzy from.”
—John Updike, “Of Prizes And Print”, 1998.
10-point Janson
“I drank up women’s tears and spat
them out
as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.”
—John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems, 2009.
her resplendent skin
“Chrysis had appeared through the western door on the first terrace of the ruddy monument. She was naked, as was the goddess. In each hand she held a corner of the scarlet veil which the wind raised against the evening sky while the mirror, held in her right hand, reflected the setting sun.
Slowly, her head bowed, moving with infinite grace and majesty, she went up the outer steps which wound like a spiral around the high vermilion tower. Her veil trembled like a flame. The fiery afterglow reddened the pearl necklace so that it seemed a river of rubies. She mounted, and in this glory her resplendent skin took on all the magnificence of flesh, blood, fire, blue carmine, velvety red, bright pink. Revolving upwards with the great purple walls, she took her way towards the sky.”
—Pierre Louys, Aphrodite, 1896; translated by Lewis Galantiere, 1933.
her millions of lights
“It was a lovely starlit night. They were on top of the Villejuif hill, when Paris appeared like a dark sea, and her millions of lights like phosphorescent waves; waves which were more clamorous, more passionate, more greedy than those of the tempestuous ocean; waves which are ever raging, foaming, and ever ready to devour what comes in their way.”
—Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, 1845; anonymous translation, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.