TYPOGRAPHICA.

Thanks to a comment by pf on an earlier entry, I have discovered Typographica, a typography blog—or, as they describe it, “a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.” It’s edited by Stephen Coles and Joshua Lurie-Terrell and has been around since May 2002; one of the first entries (by Lurie-Terrell) would have been equally at home here at LH:

There Are 10’s of Thousand’s of Way’s to Apostrophisize

Why does the New York Times use 80’s and 90’s (for example) as shorthand for referring to decades/eras? They aren’t possessives, but rather contractions of 1980s, 1990s, etc. Most journalistic and typographic stylebooks suggest using ’80s and ’90s — makes sense to me. What’s the deal? I wrote the paper to ask but no response.

(Except that I would have italicized New York Times.) The only downside I can see to reading it is that their book reviews are going to tempt me to further overload my poor groaning shelves.

Comments

  1. Link shamelessly swiped from the sidebar at exempli gratia, which is by the way a fine new-ish blog I’ve been reading for a month or so.

  2. dungbeattle says

    Sententia; minimus dare: no Known antecedants.

  3. John Cowan says

    It’s the same idea as minding your p’s and q’s: the naked plural looks weird next to a symbol, which numbers are and in this case letters are too.

  4. Typographica appears to be dead as the moa, alas.

  5. But its traces still exist in the Internet Archive.

  6. Typographica: not dead, just moved. Blog-type commentary is infrequent, but there’s a new one on the very day of the last comments (Oct. 7, 2018), on “The Last Time the US Considered Copyright Protection for Typefaces”.

    Another current typography blog: I Love Typography, with a recent article on <a href="https://ilovetypography.com/2018/08/24/a-brief-history-of-the-index/&quot;A Brief History of the Index which is definitely in Language Hat territory:

    On the rare occasions I get to peruse paper and ink books in a brick and mortar bookstore, after a brief flirtation with the cover and blurb, I will scan the table of contents, then gently – for the book is new, the clean pages crisp – thumb through the final leaves until I locate the index, where, if I am familiar with the subject matter, I expect to find, at the very least, the usual suspects. Their absence might well be symptomatic of more profound flaws between the covers; for example, a book titled The History of Psychology, whose index fails to reference, say, Freud, Jung and Mary Whiton Calkins, could safely be passed over in favor of something better. Once a book is finished, its index remains invaluable in tracking down partially or half-remembered facts and phrases. In many digital books, the index has been replaced by search but, whereas a full-text search of a digital book often requires one to know precisely what one is looking for, in an alphabetical subject index, a half-remembered name, or even the first letter of an otherwise forgotten word, is usually sufficient. It is for this reason that the designers and editors of digital books should not be in a hurry to do away with the index, for it remains an indispensable, simple and intuitive means of making texts, most especially lengthy texts, more accessible.

    … leading into a history from the first library catalogue of the Library of Alexandria to the widespread adoption of the page-number index in the 16th century. Alphabetization and pagination are technologies, which had to be invented.

  7. Thanks, I’ve replaced the blog URL. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to locate the entry about “Thousand’s of Way’s to Apostrophisize”; maybe they’ve ditched a lot of early stuff?

  8. That post is archived here. I found that URL by going to archive.org and entering the original URL in the Way Back Machine search at the top, then choosing the first date there was an archive for.

  9. Thanks! I substituted that URL in the post, but I see now that I quoted the whole thing.

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