It’s now three years since my Encyclopaedia of Fonts was released into the community — I can’t say it was published, because the idiot managing director of the publisher decided to release it to the trade in the week before Christmas, so boxes of books arrived in the shops, waited unopened in the back passage, then got returned to the publishers in January. The classic orphan book. The idiot MD is mysteriously no longer there.

As a result: no reviews, no sales. Not for the first couple of years, anyway. Now recently there have been some hesitant notices, because the book really did catch everyone unawares. All the reviews have complained how small the sample fonts are. I didn’t foresee this as a problem, till I discovered American photocopiers don’t have zoom functions.

One or two mentions have been quite positive, with one verging on the ecstatic — “the best type compendium I have ever used, bar none.” This from a gentleman who had managed to read the introduction, where I described the thinking behind the book — the font samples were arranged stylistically and chronologically. If you were fed up with Times New Roman, for example, you could see the fonts that preceded and inspired it, and you can see the fonts that came later and which may have improved upon it. It’s very useful. I use it myself.

Since the book was published, the film ‘Helvetica’ has been released to rave reviews. It was well publicised, and the oddity of making a movie about a typeface was not lost on the critics.

Now I’ve come across another font film; this one about a Conference Of The Fonts from CollegeHumor.com, short, sweet, funny and well worth sharing with you, if my technology is up to it:

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