Click to enlarge.

SERIF: TRANSITIONAL
Baskerville: British, designed by John Baskerville, 1750. Nobody ever got fired for using Baskerville. The first transitional serif face.
Bulmer: British, designed by Willliam Martin, 1790. A superb text face based on Baskerville. Amazingly legible.
Century: American, designed by Morris Fuller Benton, 1918. American printers need use no other font — and some never did.
Cochin: French, designed by Charles Malin, Georges Peignot, 1912. Named after engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin. Lovely italic.
Goudy: American, designed by Frederick W Goudy, 1916. A new tune on an old fiddle.
Perpetua: British, designed by Eric Gill, 1928. Eternally lovely, but perhaps a little too wide and spiky for today’s tastes.
Bernhard Modern: Austrian, designed by Lucien Bernhard, 1937. When you need a little break from conventional letter forms.
Palatino: German, designed by Hermann Zapf, 1950. Gorgeous, and available on every computer. Why bother with Times?
Jante Antiqua: Danish, designed by Poul Søgren, 1993. Refined, classical and barely known.
Georgia: British, designed by Matthew Carter, 1996. A tremendous workhorse. Legible at all resolutions and sizes. The VW of fonts.

Next: Serif: Didot to Slab Serif

Click to enlarge.

SERIF: OLD STYLE
Bembo: Italian, designed by Francesco Griffo, 1495. So clear and readable I named my cat after it.
Garamond: French, designed by Claude Garamond, 1532. Refined and beautiful.
Ehrhardt: Dutch, designed by Miklos Kis, 1691. An Hungarian typecutter working in Amsterdam for a German company, 300 years before the EU.
Plantin: Belgian, designed by Robert Granjon, 1700. Before Times took over the world, this was the default serif font.
Caslon: British, designed by William Caslon, 1725. Full of grace and charm.
Berling: Danish, designed by Karl-Erik Forsberg, 1951. Classic and dignified, perhaps a little too wide for C21 tastes.
Trump Mediaeval: German, designed by Georg Trump, 1954. The italic ampersand is the most beautiful single character in typography. &

Next: Serif Transitional

If you spend any time at all working with type, sooner or later someone will ask you “What is your favourite font?”

That’s an impossible question to answer, and it’s one of the reasons why there are so many different typefaces, or fonts. I have 12,732 fonts on my computer, organised by Extensis Suitcase Fusion, and of course I don’t use ten different ones a day. Different strokes for different folks.

I use Mosquito Alt for fotoLibra, I tend to use Profile for spreadsheets and computer text, Bulmer for printed text and Trump Mediaeval for printed correspondence. Other Trumps are available.

That doesn’t mean to say these are necessarily my all-time favourite fonts. They’re the ones I find most fit for purpose, I have them available and I like them.

Instead of naming one favourite font, here are my hundred best fonts — the hundred fonts that I use most often. I’ve listed them in the order in which they appear in my (now sadly out of print) Encyclopaedia of Fonts (ISBN 1-84403-206-X), which is structured by classification and date — Uncial, Blackletter, Serif, Lineal, Script, Display — together with country of origin, designer and date where known and anything else which strikes me as brief and interesting.

Tell me what you agree with. Tell me what you disagree with. And please share this!

I’d love to read your comments.

Click on the image to enlarge.

UNCIAL
American Uncial: Austrian, designed by Victor Hammer, 1953. Taken over by Ireland as their national typeface. Truly multinational.

BLACKLETTER
Fette Fraktur: German, designed by Johannes Wagner, 1875. Nobody believes that the Nazis vigorously tried to abolish blackletter, but they did.
Old English: British, designed by Monotype, 1935. Warm and comfortable. Shows how different Britain and Germany are.

SERIF: VENETIAN
Golden Type: British, designed by William Morris, 1890. Elite and exclusive, for a private press.
Clearface: American, designed by Morris Fuller Benton, 1907. Every American printer in the early C20 had to have fonts and fonts of this typeface.
Centaur: American, designed by Bruce Rogers, 1914. One of the most elegant cuttings of the Venetian style.
Vendôme: French, designed by François Ganeau, 1952. Typically French. Elegant, idiosyncratic and slightly unstable.

Next: Serif Old Style

Everyone has a mobile phone nowadays but nobody ever makes a call. At least nobody rings me, although I had a nice long call today from the lovely Jenny in Montreal complaining about the rush of American immigrants to Canada after the terrible Trump vote.

My phone does ring regularly, it’s just that it’s almost all junk. 95% of callers from overseas numbers will be people with impenetrable accents vanting to spick to ze owner of ze biznez.

For the past three months I’ve been getting three calls a day asking me to press 2 to speak to an advisor. This is more than a niggle, it’s a nightmare, especially as my mobile cuts off after three rings and transfers to voicemail so I have to call up to listen to an automatic voice telling me to press 2 — the bastard even leaves junk messages for me.

This is how I learned how to avoid it. It’s a two-stage process.

Firstly, look at your screen. You see the number calling, say 01766 78026, and below it my phone reassuringly says Porthmadog, Gwynedd or Bridport, Dorset or some such benign country town.

But something is not right! The number shown only has 10 digits. It should have 11 in the UK. It’s not real. It’s a scammer. If you answer, a recording of a woman with a horrible voice will tell you to press 2 to speak to an advisor. If you don’t, she will leave the message on your voicemail.

Here’s stage two. I’m on Vodafone, so other carriers will have their own procedure. Search the Vodafone site for ‘How do I increase the time before a call goes to voicemail?’ and they will tell you the numbers to press. I raised my gap to 30 seconds, and when the next automated scammer called (25 minutes later) they hung up before the phone had rung for 30 seconds — so no voicemail message!

Extending the time before a call goes to voicemail is not a phone function, it’s the job of the network provider. I’ve only just learned that.

I haven’t had a call for over an hour. It must be working.

In a recent New Yorker I read about a Silicon Valley accelerator for start-ups called Y Combinator. It’s headed by a super-smart 30-year-old gay vegetarian Jewish man (yes, all that essential info was offered gratis in the article) named Sam Altman.

Sam is a god to supplicant start-ups. His wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command means life or death to these poor hopefuls. Have you ever seen Dragon’s Den? It’s like that, but with real money. When fotoLibra was a start-up our accelerator was called an incubator, and we were carefully shielded from risk-hungry investors. All the people we raised money from seemed to want it back.

Smart Sam dropped out of college to work on a mobile app which told your friends where you were. Within a couple of years the app’s valuation was $175 million, but unfortunately people didn’t actually want their friends to know where they were so he sold the company for $43 million and became a guru instead.

Are people mad? Why spend $43 million on something people aren’t interested in? Facebook sold about 20% of its shares a year or so ago and raised more than the value of Belgravia. A little program that allows you to call a taxi is valued at more than Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Guest Keen & Nettlefolds and Reed Elsevier combined, and makes spectacular losses — $1.2 billion in the first six months of this year. Now we’re getting silly. No, I will not invest in your cash-incinerating start-up.

Two postulants from Norway came to see our Sam. They had the concept of an on-line temp agency, handing out freelance jobs for businesses around the world. I guess the big traffic would be linking Indian coders to American start-ups. But we can all use some outside help from time to time so I checked them out. They’re called Konsus, and of course being a child of the Cold War I read it as Konsum, the Tesco of East Germany (but without the stock).

Konsus has a clear, legible website, which you’d expect as they’d raised $1.6 million in capital before they’d ever met Sam. To my surprise one of the services they offered was content provision, which is what used to be called writing. I’m never averse to an extra buck, so I thought I’d put my name down.

I had to answer a quick-fire timed questionnaire and submit an example of my work.

So I corrected the copy on their website and submitted it to them.

I wonder if I’ll hear from them?

The educated among you may have spotted a reference from Ozymandias. You’ll remember how the C21 South Sea Bubble all ends, then:
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Oh, I’ll take Belgravia.

konsus

Fifty years ago on October 21st 1966, at about 9:15 am, a waste tip dumped by the National Coal Board on top of a hill in South Wales began to slide.

Soaked by rain and underground streams, a huge tidal wave of slurry and tailings started to rumble downhill. In its path was Ysgol Pant Glas, Aberfan’s primary school, full of children, fresh in the morning.

They never stood a chance. The school was obliterated. 116 schoolchildren aged between seven and nine were killed, along with 28 adults.

In Wales on the anniversary last Friday there was a minute’s silence of remembrance. The Prince of Wales visited Aberfan and left a wreath and a note. By Sunday the note had been taken.

In England the anniversary of the tragedy was mentioned in passing on news bulletins. But on Welsh TV there was an hour-long television poem, written by Owen Sheers and played and spoken by some of Wales’s leading actors.

I managed to track it down on iPlayer and I watched it last night. It was probably the most moving piece of drama I have seen this century. Harrowing, shocking, tragic, emotional, sorrowful — these aren’t words of recommendation. This wasn’t entertainment. This was grief. I felt as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus. And above all, the indifference of our lords and masters, still tangible after fifty years when this utter tragedy was relegated to a minor TV channel with little or no forward publicity. I only found out about it after it had been broadcast.

Aberfan — The Green Hollow is a masterpiece of television. Whether you’re from Wales or Waikiki, I challenge you to watch (and listen) to this remarkable work without a tear in your eye and rage in your heart at the callous indifference shown towards the bereaved of Aberfan by the government and the National Coal Board.

The acting is exemplary. We Welsh do grief and passion quite well. The poetry is stunning. Owen Sheers has come of age with this. I don’t use the word masterpiece lightly — this is one. Imagine a formal, serious Under Milk Wood, and you might begin to understand. Sheers doesn’t embrace verbal pyrotechnics like his predecessor, he just builds a quiet, growing intensity that captures the essence of shock and grips the viewer.

The rescuers uncover a group of twenty dead children together, their mouths open as if they were singing — but they weren’t singing — and in front of them, arms stretched wide as if to embrace and protect them all, was one teacher — one teacher against a mountain. In that description Sheers sums up the immensity and futility of the tragedy.

In court the coroner started to pass verdicts on the causes of death — asphyxiation, catastrophic injury — until a man stood up and shouted “No sir! They were buried alive by the National Coal Board!”

Please try and see this film. You won’t regret it. You won’t forget it.

The American pop singer died yesterday. His passing was eclipsed in the media by the death of Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns, because most of today’s journalists were teenagers when You Spin Me Round was a hit and weren’t born when Bobby Vee was topping the charts around the world with Take Good Care Of My Baby, Rubber Ball, More Than I Can Say, Run To Him, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes and others. That list was done from memory.

Bobby Vee was a pop singer. Pop has never been cool. Pop was what your little sister liked. If you’re serious, you’ll want to be known by one name, preferably the surname, but no one could have called Bobby Vee just Vee. His was a name in itself, like Ellie Mae, or Mary Jean — Americans love anapaestic names.

Bobby Vee was a pleasant looking chap, not handsome, but clean cut with regular features. He had a decent voice and sang in tune. He was a classic early example of the Non-Threatening Boy, every mom’s ideal choice for their daughter’s first boyfriend. The Boy Next Door, assuming you live in a white middle-class neighbourhood.

And he lived up to the dream. He was wildly popular, he married his childhood sweetheart and they stayed together for over fifty years till her death in 2015 (OK, I had to look that one up). He contracted Alzheimer’s and spent the last year of his life in a hospice.

You know, I miss him. I never bought one of his records — I’m far too cool for that — but I looked on him with admiration. He was three years older than me, better looking, a better singer, an object of envy — he was a pop star. I wanted to be a pop star. And I enjoyed his records. I can still sing the five I listed above all the way through and what’s more play them without having to glance at the sheet music. They were simple songs, crafted by the genius of Carole King & Gerry Goffin and others. Bobby Vee was a corporate creation, built by Big Brother to brainwash teenagers like us, crowd manipulation far in excess of anything Soviet Russia could manage at the time.

Then came the Beatles. Boom. Did poor Bobby Vee have another hit? I don’t think so. Certainly not in the UK, although he did have an American #3 in 1967.

RIP Bobby Vee, 1943-2016. You brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of virgins, and there aren’t many men who could say that guiltlessly.

Last night we went to see The Blues Band at the Millfield, ten minutes from us.

A bunch of old guys playing 12-bar blues. What’s not to like?

The sight of four bald bespectacled white men in their seventies playing black men’s music from seventy years ago is a spectacle in itself, an anomaly singer Paul Jones himself alluded to when he quoted an old black musician as saying “Dem white boys want to play da blues so bad. And dey do, dey do.”

Yes, that Paul Jones. Lead singer of Manfred Mann. #1 hits with “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy”, “5-4-3-2-1”, “Come Tomorrow” and many other hits of the ’60s. And one of the guitarists was Tom McGuinness, formerly of McGuinness Flint and also Manfred Mann.

I was never a Manfreds fan. I thought their pop songs were trite and there was a whiff of selling out, because they were clearly serious musicians. Paul Jones was one of the best harmonica players I’d seen, but there was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. Perhaps it was his terrible acne. He had a fine strong voice which left me unmoved; for me it lacked soul.

But there was no denying he genuinely loved the blues. 37 years ago he started The Blues Band, and apart from the drummer (originally the Flint of McGuinness Flint) the personnel has stayed the same; left to right: Dave Kelly, bassist Gary Fletcher, drummer Rob Townsend (ex Family), Paul Jones and Tom McGuinness.

I said four bald bespectacled white men in their seventies. There are five in the group. Paul Jones is a wonder of nature, as my friend Martha would say. He’s 74, trim, slim, active, fit, with a full head of fair hair. Frankly, he looked great and he sounded great. The acne’s been vanquished. His voice was as strong as ever, and he even sang an uncannily accurate snatch from the Newbeats‘ ‘Bread & Butter’ (check it out).

I am consumed with jealousy, but as Von whispered, “He probably doesn’t drink beer and watch telly all the time.”

Persiflage comes easily to some; for others it’s a strain. The band attempted to banter with the audience, but it was leaden and predictable. You’ve got it or you haven’t. Americans have it built-in. They played with an ease and a slackness which wouldn’t be tolerated in an ultra-tight US band like Little Feat, but as they said, the 12-bar blues is a British invention — the original bluesmen wandered between 10 and 15 bars as and when they felt like it. I remember when I played with John Lee Hooker in 1965 he generally preferred the 13- or 14-bar blues until we got accustomed to it, at which point he’d savagely switch back to 12-bar and glare at us accusingly.

The audience adored it, a sea of silver heads nodding in near unison, and although it would be cruel to criticise the performance as static and anodyne, the band made Lloyd Cole and the Commotions look like a tumbling act.

Will we be seeing elderly white grime rappers in 2070? I won’t because I won’t be around. But I loved The Blues Band; it’s what I always wanted to do, but wasn’t quite good enough.

We got back home, a hot sticky night after three glorious late summer days, including the hottest day of the year on Wednesday — 94°. I was woken at 4am by four things — the room white with lightning, the loudest clap of thunder I think I’ve ever heard and Bembo and Milo simultaneously leaping into the bed. A fortnight’s worth of rain fell in an hour.

Well, that’s done and dusted. Britain’s best Olympics since 1908. We came second in the medals table. Didn’t we do well? One medal for just about every million people who live in the country.

That set me thinking. Of course we did brilliantly, but a lot of people live on these islands. How about Fiji, who beat us to the first Rugby Sevens gold medal? They’ve got a population of 30 — the First XV and the Second XV.

So here’s my End of Term Report. How does the medal table look if the population of the countries are taken into account? How many Croatians are needed to win a gold medal?

The answer is — not many at all. Several countries have a strike rate far better than ours. Here’s a list of the gold medals won per number of population (Usain Bolt is not a country) and we rank a lowly 13th, behind Kosovo which isn’t even a real country and, I hate to say it, New Zealand. Click on it to read it.

And here’s a list of all medals won ranked by population. We did even worse here, dropping to 18th. But look where China and the USA are. And as for India, you should be ashamed of yourself. Buck up, boy, or you’ll get a good flogging. Must try harder!

Tracking the Wimbledon singles results is something I enjoy doing every year. My interest is best expressed by an old Peanuts cartoon where Linus ecstatically reports the result of a game — the crowd was sobbing, the coach was laughing, the team were rolling on the pitch — and Charlie Brown asks “How did the other side feel?”

Being London Welsh I am genetically disposed to root for the underdog (except when they’re playing Wales or the Scarlets).

So as people chart the progress of their favourite player to the Championship, I have to track it in reverse. Who is the biggest loser?

This year my Wimbledum Champion is SANTIAGO GIRALDO of Colombia. He lost to Gilles Muller, who lost to Andrey Kusnetskov, who lost to Kei Nishikori, who lost to Marin Cilic, who lost to Roger Federer, who lost to Milos Raonic, who lost to ANDY MURRAY!

And the Wimbledee Champion is CAMILA GIORGI of Italy, who lost to Garbine Muguruza, who lost to Jana Cepelova, who lost to LucIe Safarova, who lost to Yaroslava Shvedova, who lost to Venus Williams, who lost to Angelique Kerber, who lost to SERENA WILLIAMS!

Santiago and Camila still managed to walk away with £30,000 each, just for getting into the first round.

I must take up this tennis lark one day.