My Type

I've discovered a newfound love: typography.  I know, I know: what took me so long?  There are entire careers devoted to the study of letters, and my lightbulb took seventeen years to turn on?  It's sad, but true.  Now, though, I have a thorough admiration of the subject: the tones and voices that can be portrayed simply by changing the curve of your commas or putting tails on your t's.  It's remarkable the impact a font has on the way one perceives a piece of writing: forget judging a book by its cover, open a novel only to find the whole thing written in Comic Sans and I'm guessing more than one of you would jump ship before you'd even read the chapter title.  Some fonts are professional, some childish, others so mundane you don't even notice them.  This is partly due to the ways they are used in society: Arial is a default settings on many computers, and therefore almost invisible to the reader; Times New Roman is the preferred font for major essays and reports; and Crafty Girls…well, I suppose that one's self-explanatory.  But for me, Special Elite will always be tops: typewriter fonts make me think of dimly lit rooms with plush red curtains lining tall, rain-spattered windows, and gargantuan mahogany shelves laden with old tomes shadowing lush leather armchairs by a carved mantelpiece.  Typewriter lettering is classic, something young enough that I can reach for it but too old to ever touch its time.  It's what marks the pages of my Jane Austen and Charles Dickens books, what connects me to decades I wish I'd lived, what binds me.  And all this from the curve of its commas and the tails on its t's.