easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

In the issue of The New Yorker that arrived in today’s mail, there’s an essay on Benjamin Franklin by Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, titled: “The creed: what Poor Richard cost Benjamin Franklin.” It’s a fascinating article, if only because Franklin himself is endlessly fascinating; Lepore can’t begin to encompass his breadth in this short piece, but that’s part of her point. She strews aphorisms from Poor Richard’s Almanac through the article, as a commentary and as a way to attempt to integrate the image that Franklin gained through the Almanac and the infinitely more cosmopolitan man that Franklin was himself. One point she doesn’t make, but that was obvious to me as I read, is that Franklin echoed the ancient Greeks, in the dysjunction between their mottoes and aphorisms and advice to themselves, and the flagrantly disreputable and unreliable way in which they actually behaved.

But there’s a wrong note at the beginning of Lepore’s essay. She starts right out by describing how Franklin left Philadelphia in April of 1757 to get to New York, intending to take ship there for London. “But one delay piled upon another, like so much ragged paper jamming a printing press, and he found himself stuck for more than two months.” Frustrating for a man so intent on getting things done.

But wait – paper jamming a printing press? What kind of press would that be? It’s quite clear that Lepore’s simile is based on a modern, mechanized printing press, where paper is fed automatically into the machine; if a sheet jams, the paper behind it can pile up until the press is shut off. But the printing press in Benjamin Franklin’s time wasn’t mechanized at all; it was a hand-operated press. Each sheet was laid down individually by hand. In fact, the “Franklin press” that has inspired so many printshop names over two hundred years (including the shop in Seattle where I first learned to be a typesetter, albeit in a far different technology from the one Franklin learned) was incapable of producing what Lepore is imagining. The very first image in her essay is an anachronism.

Categorized as culture, printing |

Bruce Sterling just noted Shelley Jackson’s “Skin Project,” the 2,095-word short story being published in an “edition of one” by being tattooed, one word at a time, on the bodies of 2,095 different people. Although I’ve never met Shelley Jackson, I’ve participated indirectly in this project: in November 2006, I provided typographic assistance to editor Ellen Datlow and writer/editor Kelly Link, who were in Austin, Texas, for the World Fantasy Convention and who were both about to get tattoos as part of this project. Each of them had a single word to be turned into a tattoo: for Kelly, “skin”; for Ellen, “device.” (including the final period).

I gave them several choices of typeface, based on what they told me they’d like and on what I thought would work in a tattoo. (Admittedly, this was a brand new production consideration for me.) The four typefaces I tried out were Monotype Baskerville, Requiem, Monotype Bell, and Adobe Garamond. Ellen picked Monotype Bell; I don’t recall which typeface Kelly chose.

Early stages of this project were shown in Ina Saltz’s book Body type, a collection of photographs of tattoos that involve words, but the “Skin Project” was far from done when Ina’s book went to press. (In fact, it was on the shelf in Austin’s excellent bookstore Book People when Kelly went there to do a reading during the convention.)

Which typefaces got used, ultimately? Ellen picked Monotype Bell (third one down in the image at left). I don’t recall which one Kelly ended up choosing.

Categorized as books, culture, fonts |

When I first arrived in Seattle, at the tail end of 1975, you had to go to another neighborhood just to find an espresso. Starbucks was a little shop in the Pike Place Market that sold bulk coffee and tea, with a single outpost on Broadway, on Capitol Hill, a short but steep walk away from where I lived. And they didn’t sell espresso in those days; that came later. For that full sipping-an-espresso experience, you had to go to one of the city’s hip student coffeehouses, such as the Last Exit or the Allegro, in the University District.

That changed. When Starbucks became an international chain of coffee bars, I realized that what it was really selling wasn’t just coffee: it was design. Or at least the feeling of design. (This raises all the perennial questions about the relationship between design and style.) Quite simply, it felt good to go into a Starbucks and spend some time there – sort of like having coffee in an art-museum café.

What Starbucks is these days, as far as I can see, is basically a caffeine-based soda fountain. In a lot of Starbucks outlets, they look at you funny if you order a straight espresso; they have to go searching for a real espresso cup. An Overhead Hemi Double Frappuccino Nonfat Mocha, on the other hand, they can handle with ease.

This isn’t a bad thing, except for those of us who like straight espresso. The American soda fountain was a cultural institution and a social gathering place; its demise has been a loss for American culture. If Starbucks fills that gap, I won’t complain, even if they do so by imitating the sweet soda-fountain offerings of my youth (with an extra jolt for the workaholic). Well, maybe I’ll complain a little.

[Photo: the original Starbucks logo, currently found only on the original Starbucks store, in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Photo by me, this afternoon.]

Categorized as culture, design |

If you’ve been to our house, perhaps you have, though it’s currently displayed in an unconspicuous place. I’ve had this poster since I picked it up on the street in Berkeley, California, sometime in the early 1970s; most likely during the year I lived in San Francisco after graduating from college in 1971. I bought it not just for its political content but because it was beautiful. But I’ve never been able to find out who made the poster.

It’s silkscreened, in many colors. There’s no signature. The art is brilliant, the lettering very funky (deliberately, I assume), and the vertical placement of the word “DOWN” is witty. But who did it? I asked David Lance Goines, who I thought might know, but the artist he suggested wasn’t working in Berkeley that early in the ’70s. Have you seen this poster before, or other work by the same artist? I’d love to solve this mystery at last.

When I got this framed, several years ago, by the Seattle artist and frame-shop owner Kay Rood, she reminisced about her days in France in May 1968, helping student radicals print revolutionary posters for that spring’s huge demonstrations. But alas, she said ruefully, it never occurred to her to keep copies of any of them.

[Update, Dec. 14:] I’ve added a close-up of a detail from the poster, to give a little better idea of what the artwork is like. Some of it reminds me of cut-paper techniques and of woodblock prints, though this is silkscreened.

Categorized as ambient letters, culture, design |

My copy of the Helvetica DVD arrived a couple of days ago – you know, Gary Hustwit’s full-length documentary about a typeface, which has become inexplicably popular far beyond the typographic world. What this film does more than anything else – more than tell us about the actual typeface Helvetica, though it does that quite well – is show us how ubiquitous type is in the world around us, and how this obscure practice, typography, is something we live with every single day. That, I imagine, is the source of its wider appeal.

I’ve been browsing the DVD’s “Extras” – outtakes and extra material that didn’t make it into the movie. My favorite quotes are from Neville Brody and Erik Spiekermann:

Neville Brody on type in the world: “All schools should be teaching typography. We should be fundamentally aware of how typographic language is forming our thoughts.”

Erik Spiekermann, after describing how he’s been re-designing the timetables for the German railroads: “That stuff is what makes a nation’s culture: it’s the visual surrounding. You know: good architecture, good food, and good timetables, or good announcements on the walls of stations – I think that’s a very important cultural contribution.” [Erik Spiekermann]

I was also pleased to hear that, like me, Erik looks first to the lowercase a when identifying a typeface.

Categorized as ambient letters, culture, fonts, type designers, typography |

In August we visited Kanazawa, an old city on the Sea of Japan, where there’s a ruined castle, one of the three most celebrated gardens in Japan, and the brand-new, opened-in-February 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art.

What got my attention was the museum. It’s circular in plan, with four entrances; there’s no “front,” and the museum’s spaces comprise a cavalcade of rooms, corridors, and open courtyards, all of them of different sizes, shapes, and even heights. It’s the most amazing interpenetration of outside and inside, public space and private space, that I’ve ever seen. The art was pretty good, too, but it was the museum itself that I’m glad I saw.

One of the permanent installations is the James Turrell Room, a huge square room like a Roman pluvium: open to the sky in the middle, with stone walls and bench seats and a stone floor with subtle, nearly invisible drainage for the runoff when it rains. And it did rain. When I first went into the Turrell Room, it was a humid, pre-storm day; the clouds ran overhead on the wind, with patches of blue sky appearing and disappearing behind them, and the air in the room was intensely humid. (So was the world outside.) A little while later, when I dragged Eileen and Ellen Datlow back to see the Turrell Room, it had rained; the floor was wet, and a light after-storm sprinkle still fell through the wide square opening in the roof. In typical James Turrell style, extremely subtle banks of lights glowed behind the backs of the side-benches, tinting the walls a slowly-changing range of pastels, which added to the luminous effect. It was a peculiar form of site-specific magic.

One of the two current exhibits was created for the Kanazawa museum, although the artist was from the UK: Grayson Perry’s “My Civilization” presents a kaleidoscopic overview of Perry’s transgressive work, in a form created expressly for this venue. The show opened in Kanazawa, and only later would it head off to London. While Perry’s drawing and ceramic skills impressed me, and he struck me as a wonderfully disruptive kind of artist, it remained the museum itself that pleased me more than any of the art within it.

The interior spaces vary in height and shape and purpose; they’re intertwined with corridors and courtyards that are open to the air – and sometimes to the public, who otherwise have to pay an admission fee for the main exhibits. That interpenetration is at the heart of the Kanazawa museum: literally as well as intellectually.

The museum even uses a schematic of its circular layout as its logo. At the museum shop, I picked up a nicely patterned orange-and-white neck cloth (one of those necessities of Japan’s hot, humid summers) with the logo worked into its design; it served me well, both practically and as an image of the museum, until I left it on the Gatwick Express, three weeks later and a world away.

Although Kanazawa has a long history, establishing a cutting edge art museum there is probably a bit like creating, say, a Spokane Museum of Contemporary Art, and endowing it with a huge budget and a global mission. (Not that I wouldn’t be happy to see such a thing.) It appeals to my anti-metropolitan bias, though my equally strong metropolitan bias just shakes its head. I applaud what looks to me like a heroic effort, and I’m glad to have had the chance to walk through this museum only months after its opening, before some of my Japanese acquaintances have even had a chance to visit it

Categorized as architecture, culture, design |

When I was in San Francisco last week – no, the week before last – at Jack Stauffacher’s regular Friday lunch in North Beach, the people seated around the table found themselves reading about…themselves. Occasional luncher Kristina Bell had brought one of the editors of Task Newsletter, and he had brought with him copies of the first issue – which included an article by Kristina about these very lunches. Actually, it was a selection of transcripts from the conversation on various Fridays, plus a few thumbnail photos of attendees. To see some of the same people intently reading, or at least browsing through, an article about themselves and their conversation some months earlier…it gets recursive, like an infinitely receding set of mirrors.

I always make a point of trying to time my San Francisco sojourns so that I can make it to lunch on Friday. The café is nothing special, just a friendly place with decent sandwiches, not too crowded and not too noisy, where we can talk. To preserve the privacy of these permeable but non-public gatherings, the Task article blacks out the name of the café each time it’s mentioned, giving the piece a resemblance to something you might obtain through the Freedom of Information Act after it’s been redacted by the FBI.

Jack encourages a sort of show-and-tell from the people who come to these lunches, and you never know what people will bring. Sometimes it’s a book from Jack’s own collection, sometimes a project someone is working on, sometimes intellectual booty brought back from afar by a recent traveler. This time, Jack had brought a copy of the 1946 edition of László Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, designed by Paul Rand; I had just been looking at this very book’s title page in Alan Bartram‘s Bauhaus, Modernism & the Illustrated Book. It was instructive to see how much more effective Rand’s design was in the hand than in a tiny reproduction.

Like Jack himself, the lunches make connections: not just of people, but of ideas. I firmly believe that it’s in unpretentious exchanges like this that culture is made.

[Photos | Top: William Clauson, Jack Stauffacher. Bottom: Pino Trogu, Slobodan Dan Paich, Eileen Gunn, Kristina Bell.]

Categorized as culture, design, events |

Julie Gomoll, who gave me and Paul Novitski a lot of help in figuring out how this blog ought to work, is involved in a project that makes me envious. She’s busy setting up LaunchPad Coworking, a co-working café in Austin, Texas – and as soon as I heard about it I wanted one in my town, too. I’d like one around the corner, please. (Actually, since I live in Seattle, it seems entirely likely that someone will open such a café here, and when they do, it’ll probably be in my neighborhood.)

I’ve always liked the idea of dispersed work, and the complementary idea of places where people could work independently together. The physical combination of a workplace and a social space could be disastrous, but it could also be enormously energizing. Depends on the people, of course, and on how it’s set up.

Julie has started a number of businesses (go ahead, google her), and this one has instant appeal. She and her co-conspirators are documenting the ramp-up on a blog (naturally), with photos. Looks like fun. Let’s see, when will I be in Austin next?

They’re aiming to open in the spring.

Categorized as culture, design |

“Well,” said a friend of mine, with a laugh, “the New York Times thinks hyphens are old-fashioned.”

My god, what in inordinately stupid article! Hyphens exist for clarity. All punctuation exists to make it possible to read our words right the first time through, not have to puzzle over them. (That’s why we have spaces between words, too. We didn’t always.) There’s no virtue in less or more punctuation; only in exactly the right punctuation to communicate clearly.

Charles McGrath, who ought to know better, is just twittering on about fashion.

And I won’t even get into the usefulness of hyphens in typography.

Categorized as culture, typography, writing & editing |

Just five days after getting back from Japan, I was off to the UK for the 2007 ATypI conference in Brighton. The theme was “Hands on,” and the series of talks and workshops dovetailed nicely with that flexible idea. The nearby village of Ditchling, where Edward Johnston had lived and Eric Gill had established one of his utopian crafts communities, came up repeatedly in presentations and casual conversation; indeed, one of the pre-conference excursions was a day at Ditchling, although I was too busy with conference organizing and board meetings to get to it.

The kick-off on Thursday night was Looking for Mr Gill, a short film by Luke Holland about Gill’s reputation in Ditchling and his effect on the village. It’s a film that I think ought to get shown in the United States; I’m going to see what can be arranged in Seattle and San Francisco.

At the ATypI annual general meeting, I was elected president of ATypI. As I told a friend who asked what extra work and duties this illustrious post entailed: “The presidential palace, of course, and the Praetorian Guard. Potemkin villages built for my benefit, every time I tour the countryside. I don’t think there are any drawbacks, though they did say something about a little ceremony they do come harvest time…”

At the Saturday night “garden party,” we announced that next year’s conference will be held in St. Petersburg – Russia, that is, not Florida. Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the creation of the “Civil Type,” Peter the Great’s dramatic reform of the Cyrillic alphabet. Since St. Petersburg was founded by Peter to be his new capital and “window on Europe,” the conjunction of city and anniversary is especially appropriate.

[Photo: the kinetic Ken Garland, one of the principal speakers at the ATypI conference, spun on his heel just as I snapped the picture.]

Categorized as culture, events |