“His lectures were . . . far more than a course of instruction in formal penmanship. His discourse roamed far and wide: stars, philosophy, folktales—anything might find a place in them. ‘He related his subject,’ as Noel Rooke said, ‘to everything in heaven and earth’ because he saw it as essentially part of a whole. Since writing was an activity of man, the question of man’s life on earth and the kind of universe in which he found himself had, for him, an essential connection with the work in hand. Therefore his lecture could embrace almost any subject and must have considerably widened the horizons of those students—and they were numerous—whose educations had been conventionally narrow. At one class he would explain to them his view that ‘our reasoning itself is a game, like our chess or our mathematics’ or that it was not self-contradictory to say that ‘we are predestined to have free will’. At the next, in speaking of the roundness of the letter O, he would describe the experiment with a soap film and a loop of thread—the prettiest experiment in physics—which is used to demonstrate that a perfect circle encloses the greatest area that a closed loop can contain.”

—Priscilla Johnston from Edward Johnston, 1959, a biography of her father, the great type designer.