Pictures of Letters

My introduction to a font legend

My wife does collage. She’s quite good. She’s also a little emphatic, so there are an intimidating number of books and magazines stacked around her office waiting to be cut up. It’s like death row on the Island of Misfit Toys. The absolutely bonkers things she finds in old books and magazines are entertaining as hell (I’ve shared them before).

Last week, while rifling through some design books, she shared Lettering for Advertising (1956) with me. No one has manufactured a book this substantial in the 21^st century. The academic-red hardcover was well-cared-for and still gleamed, jacketless and disproportionately thin for its weightiness.

Inside we found alphabet after alphabet in different fonts; some swooped, some peaked-and-vallyed, some were all right angles. While at first glance it seemed like a child’s letter book, instead each lettering style varied in subtle ways and was provided as a jumping-off point for the student to create their own fonts.

Imagine not only learning to make your own font, but to wanting to learn to make your own font, that moment of discovery in art school where you realize lettering is your thing.

The book’s author, Mortimer Leach, said something in the foreword, like, “If you can letter, you’ll always find employment.” The implication being that it was a fallback position for people who wanted to do “real” art but couldn’t support themselves that way.

It seemed corny and a little short-sighted to believe people would be hand-lettering headlines in magazine ads until the end of time.

Then I looked him up.

A Letter Giant

Leach apparently is an historic figure in the typeface world. Also, there’s a typeface world. Of course there is. Technology ignited rather than dampened people’s love for making and using fonts.

I hunted down a short biography about Leach that I thought you might get a kick out of. Plus, now I can make conversation about typography (I almost feel bad for the next person who mentions typeface in my presence).

Let me give you some highlights.

He was a freelance hand-letterer in the 30s, which was a kind of rare thing at the time. As advertising got more competitive, though, the demand for people to draw more distinctive letters for ads was crazy high.

Mortimer Leach was one of the top guys. A couple of his greatest hits (and we’re still talking fonts here) are the Union ’76 orange ball logo, the Hunt’s Ketchup label, and Scotch Tape.

When WWII started, Leach got a letter from the government telling him not to enlist for the draft and that he should instead move from N.Y. to Los Angeles to do top secret work involving nautical maps. He liked the weather and stayed.

If you search his name here, you will find a review of his book.

Leach started teaching at “The Art Center” and instructed and mentored students who went on to become legends of typeface. This is true. Leach isn’t the only legendary typeface artist. He’s got lots of company in the font pantheon.

His particular genius wasn’t so much “inventing” typefaces, but rather teaching students how to use existing typefaces to greater effect. How to really get the most out of the fonts available to you by finding the right way to shade a particular font in relation to the subject matter.

The idea was a skilled letterer could take a mock up and make the final version of an ad “pop” if they could make the letters more … lettery?

One of Leach’s former students named a font after him: Mort Modern (found on the website where I got 90% of this story).

How crazy is it to want to get good at lettering? I mean, no crazier than wanting to get good at anything else, I suppose, but you get the impression a person has to be built a certain way to love dickering with line widths and swoops. Maybe they’re like the actuaries of the arts, expending an immense amount of interest and talent on things you’re meant to barely notice.

Look at this “l.” Some people care deeply about how concave the top is. Some even can know that the top of an “l” has a name (I am not one of these people).

Wait! It’s a “serif.”

Letter Language

People still make fonts. Typeface permeated popular culture once desktop publishing became a thing. People had signature fonts they used for their emails. Hell, I write this in “Palatino” meaning that, according to me, Palatino is the way I want you to experience this missive.

Except, you very well might not have Palatino on your browser. Or you might have your browser set so you only read things in your preferred font. This calls into question whether and how important font choice is to a given narrative.

Whenever I’ve been forced to select a font or to select between fonts, my design ignorance is evident. I’ve spent too much sitting before a computer, changing fonts and knowing what doesn’t look good, but not knowing why.

There are good people with a burning hatred for Comic Sans. Fonts matter to us more than we might admit, but they matter even more deeply than we ever could imagine to the Leaches of the world.

A Twist!

I was going to write more about how obscure an area of study fonts was until I remembered a Gary Gulman joke about a documentary called Helvetica. When I searched for the link, I learned that the documentary is real, not just the setup for another joke.

Here’s the trailer:

I will watch this movie ASAP and report back. If you’ve already seen it, tell me how it was. If you want to see it, here’s a link.

This is a random fact that had no place in this story: back in pre-war N.Y. Mort’s wife, Betty, managed Bob Hope.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

I’m getting ready to do my next “Return to Sender” letter. I’ve made a note of it here (and below). I’ve said it before, but I’m redoubling my effort to use the “Notes” function here to develop stories if you’d like to follow along. I’ll provide links here weekly.

I mentioned last time that I was doing a sentence-per-day thing on Instagram. They’ll often be sneak previews of what I’m working on for you guys (lots of times it’s funeral stuff, though). Here’s my favorite sentence in this story. I’m embarrassed at how pleased I was with myself over it, the imagery of books waiting to be sliced into collage.

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