a single Latin letter lying flat

“Somebody hands you a piece of paper filled with letters and numbers and you have to make a ball game out of it. You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants, and it is remarkable, thinks Russ, how much earthly disturbance, how much summer and dust the mind can manage to order up from a single Latin letter lying flat.”

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997.

a nice abbreviated online history of graphic design

typographic correctness

“The practicabillity of a type selection is as vital to typographic correctness as distinctive ‘atmosphere.’ An inharmonious color tone, a misfit size, an illegibility in mass, will transform the most appropriate ‘feeling’ into the most incongruous effect.’”

—Frederic Dannay, How to Use Modern Display Types, 1931; quoted by Steven Heller and Louise Fili in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age, 1999.

grey matter

“Type should be read. Too often . . . type is referred to as color. This is not wrong in itself, but leads to the next step which is to regard it as some grey matter which in turn can be cut up with scissors.”

—Erik Nitsche, quoted by Steven Heller and Louise Fili in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age, 1999.

A typical Dada design

“Columns of justified and ragged type often were skewed beyond
conventional margins; multiple type weights and faces from different
type families were used unharmoniously in a single composition; and
hot-metal type material (heavy rules and stock illustrations) were
strewn willy nilly throughout the pages. A typical Dada design looked,
in printer’s terms, like the contents of a hellbox (a receptacle for
smashed and broken type bodies).”

—Steven Heller and Louise Fili, Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age, 1999.

the golden age of typography

“The meaningless lines or excrescences upon which so many modern
designers, wthout ability to reach the higher beauties, rely, in their
endeavor to conceal their lack of genius or taste, were never present
in the type of the golden age of typography.”

—Frederic Goudy, The Art in Type Design, 1912; quoted in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age
by Steven Heller and Louise Fili, 1999. They add: “The golden age of which he
speaks is the sixteenth century, when some of the classic ‘humanist’
faces (Bodoni, Garamond, Jensen) were introduced.”

The business of printed lettering

“The business of printed lettering has now, under the spur of commercial competition, got altogether out of hand and gone mad.”

—Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, 1930; quoted in Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age by Steven Heller and Louise Fili, 1999.

American Beauty

“‘Aunt Tempe shook out a dress and held it at an authoritative angle with her head tilted to match. ‘I must say I never heard of a red wedding before.’
    ‘American Beauty, Aunt Tempe!’ cried India, teasingly whisking it from her and beginning to dance about after Dabney, holding it high.
    ‘I stand corrected,’ said Aunt Tempe.
    ‘They fade out before they get to Shelley and Dabney,’ Laura told her consolingly.”

—Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, 1946.

Memphis ice slippers

“‘Roxie, where are the Memphis mints?’
    ‘Great big pasteboard box yonder in de pantry, Miss Tempe,’ called Roxie. ‘Have to untie you de ribbon to git you a taste. But you ought to see dem Memphis ice slippers! Green!’
    Tempe went from the pantry to the back-porch icebox. ‘And hard as rocks—I know,’ she said. ‘And slippery—! People’ll lose them off their plates and they’ll slide across the floor from here to yonder, oh  me.’”

—Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, 1946.

the shining dust

“The air was a kind of radiant haze, which disappeared into a dim blue among hanging boots above—a fragrant store dust that looked like gold dust in the light from the screen door. Cracker dust and flour dust and brown-sugar particles seemed to spangle the air the minute you stepped inside. (And she thought, in the Delta, all the air everywhere is filled with things—its the shining dust that makes it look so bright.)”

—Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, 1946.