Marcin Wichary featured here a decade ago in a post on the pilcrow; now I’m happy to present his The hardest working font in Manhattan. It begins:
In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
The font’s name is Gorton.
If you care anything about fonts, urban history, or, hell, good writing, I urge you to devour the whole thing and enjoy the splendid collection of images. I really should read him more often…
A fabulous survey of the Gorton font. I especially like the tool near the end where you can type something and play around with weights, kerning, etc.
Of all the late-night talk show hosts, only Jimmy Kimmel has a (pretty superfluous) name plate on his desk, executed in, you guessed it, Gorton. On a nice faux-wood background.
It is indeed well written and beautifully illustrated, and kept my interest throughout despite the fact that the actual subject matter doesn’t appeal to me at all. High-class writing …
Wonderful writing.
From memory, two other Gorton spottings:
1. Slide rules, I think. Keuffel + Esser, mentioned in the article, made some slide rules, and surely used their own engraving system. All slide rules have engraved letters and figures.
2. Not long after I got my first well-paying job, I decided that I needed to own a duck call, for no particular reason. I went to a scary gun shop, and selected the cheapest duck call, mallard, by the P.S. Olt Company of Pekin, IL. The model number and the company name were engraved in the black plastic (bakelite?) of the curved barrel of the instrument, in Gortonian.
Also, I wonder if the type style in Dymo machines (the ones that produce an adhesive plastic tape with embossed white letters) is based on Gorton, if not identical to it.
Wish I’d kept my slide rule …
This is indeed a captivating read. However, over on the typography-themed forum TypeDrawers, John Savard comments as follows:
Since the typefaces in question were never named, it’s kind of arbitrary whether we choose to call them, say, “Leroy” or “Leroy Gorton”.
The latter would be a good name for a private investigator or something.
“Gorton Leroy“, on the other hand, is the shady nighclub owner, a retired bootlegger keen to become socially respectable, who is ultimately behind the murder; though it turns out that he was blackmailed into it by the femme fatale* who made a pass at the private eye earlier, but failed in her scheme because he’s just so jaded and cynical and manly and is played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie.
* She calls him “Gort”, but everyone else calls him “Mister Leroy.” Or “Boss.”
laurels to DE! (or perhaps a wreath of leeks?)
and @JP: i’m glad(?) to know that font enthusiasts have their own lumper/splitter wars.
“Gorton Leroy“, on the other hand, is the shady nighclub owner…”
His son Max, a jazz enthusiast, opened his own club, a basement haunt in the Village…
Leroy’s Lounge, where everyone from the brilliant French zither player Charles “Oiseau” Parcoeur to the sadly underestimated British flautist Kilometres Davies came to make their reputations.
Furlong Davies, surely. No kilometres here.
Gorton is the name of a bothy in the Southern Highlands, which keeps making me confused about my current context.
I, on the other hand, keep thinking of frozen fish sticks and hearing the jingle.
Furlong Davies, surely.
Quite right, of course. Don’t know how I could make such a silly mistake.
‘Kilometres Davies’ made me laugh, though. I’ve only just got the first one, I was trying to translate the surname…
Hat has in fact slightly confused matters. The famous cithariste was of course Charles Parkour (hence the soubriquet “l’oiseau.”) The name is of Breton origin.
wazoh
And his instrument was the alto kazoo.
In the finest tradition of LH topic drift, my attention was drawn to the comic-book panel that refers to “Flacchus”.This alternative to “Flaccus”, perhaps influenced by “Gracchus”. Is not unknown to Dr. Google, but it’s much rarer.
It also bears mentioning that Marcin Wichary has written the definite book on the history of typewriters and keyboards: Shift Happens
Sounds great:
Here is Schawlow’s laser eraser. Sadly, Schawlow became a crackpot in later years, but actually for an admirable reason. He was drawn into Facilitated Communication, because he wanted to able to talk to his autistic son.
WP-spelunking on this revealed to me that the altogether remarkable and admirable Michael Faraday found time to investigate the ideomotor effect (some counterweight to reading about all the lives destroyed by the Facilitated Communication cult.)
The Faraday references led me to his sponsor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Jack_Fuller
Truly, Reality is Unrealistic.
the wichary sounds like a lot of fun! i’m currently sitting across from the Smith No. 2 typewriter – dual keyboard, no shift – that i …acquired… from the American Oriental Society office quite a long time ago. i haven’t ever gotten a ribbon re-inked for it, but it’s a gorgeous machine.
The Smith-Corona merger occurred, sez the internet, in 1926. No doubt there are small but vociferous groups of enthusiasts who debate the relative merits of pre-merger Smiths versus pre-merger Coronas. As of about a decade ago (and still, AFAIK) my father had possession of a pre-merger Corona (I think? conceivably a Smith?) that was a special “scientific” model offering the ability to type various additional math/science-suitable glyphs that the standard models didn’t have. This was, I was told, the literal machine on which my paternal grandfather had hand-typed his doctoral dissertation (in “Technological Chemistry,” which I suspect another university might have lumped in with “Chemical Engineering”) back in the 1920’s.*
*Part of the dissertation then got reworked as a paper co-authored with G.H. Montillon titled “Measurements of Hydrogen Ion Concentration in Plating Baths,” which got published in professionally-typeset form after wowing the crowd at the 1929 General Meeting of the American Electrochemical Society.
The Shift Happens is an amazing book. The pictures are gorgeous, and the text is on par with that article on Gorton. Unfortunately it was only printed in a limited run through Kickstarter. I have some friends who have been salivating over my copy, and they have been trying to find it online, but so far without success.
I hope some publishing house will pick it up and print another run.