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.