Alphabet City Press

6 July 20146 July 2014

Murray Hill

Murray Hill is the area of midtown Manhattan bounded by East 34th Street, East 40th Street, Madison Avenue and Third Avenue. The Murray family—shipping and overseas trade merchants—arrived in the 1750s, and soon after rented land from the city for a great house and farm. They built their house, named Inclenberg but popularly called Murray Hill, on the corner of what is now Park Avenue and 36th Street. Murray Hill, the typeface, was designed for the American Type Founders (ATF) in 1956 by Emil J Klumpp. I always imagined that Murray Hill was named for the Manhattan neighbourhood, but in fact the inspiration came from the small town of Murray Hill in New Jersey. There is a connection however: the New Jersey town was founded by Carl H Schultz, whose mineral water business was at one time located in New York’s Murray Hill.

3 July 20142 July 2014

GSM

I doubt the graffitist was thinking about the weight of paper when they altered this ‘no standing’ sign, but in my world, GSM stands for ‘grams per square metre’, and is the standard of paper measurement that allows people who work with paper—printers, designers, artists, bookbinders, etc—to know exactly what they’re dealing with in terms of thickness. This week I replenished my paper supplies with two of my favourite papers: Stonehenge White (245 GSM) and Zerkall Laid (120 GSM). Stonehenge is a machine-made fine art paper with a smooth surface, made in the USA, and Zerkall Laid is a German paper with irregular wavy laid lines. I like them because I can draw and paint on them, print on them, cut them up, fold them, glue them, and I can put them through my inkjet printer and get the result I want before I fold them and bind them.

30 June 201430 June 2014

Beware

At this time of year the snakes are more likely to be hibernating, but it’s a funny thing to come across a warning such as this, at a roadside rest stop, spraypainted onto the concrete path between the car park and the restroom. It could well make the unwary traveller more than a little nervous to discover that the facilities are the eco-self-composting-hole-in-the-ground variety rather than safe and civilised autoflushers! Although perhaps, given that the rest area is off the Federal Highway, en route to Canberra, this warning could be interpreted as a political statement.

27 June 201427 June 2014

Green F

The alphabet is everywhere, including in the garden, although not mine. My garden doesn’t look anything like this! My garden is neglected and untidy—although far from unloved—and struggling to recover from the crazy strong winds earlier this week that have turned everything so dry, making a mockery of the torrential rain we had only a couple of weeks ago. Now, things are brittle to the touch and everything in my world is a potential source of static electricity. Alphabet topiary is always Helvetica-like: who would be obsessive enough to tame a hedge into a serif letterform!

24 June 201424 June 2014

Help

I had no plan about what to write about today, so I decided to put it off and go to the gym instead. (See! I really didn’t know what to write about!) On my return the street was busier than usual for the time of day so I had to park further down the road, a spot which afforded me a view of the sky that I would have missed had I parked in the usual place in front of my house. So today I am thankful to the Taoist principle of wu wei—or ‘right place, right time’, where action does not involve struggle or excessive effort but instead allows for the harmonious working of the universe. In fact, I was so thrilled to see this single, perfect word in the sky that I did not hang around to see another word appear and turn it into some advertising gimmick. The irony also amused me: that a pilot with such control of the plane that they could write the word ‘help’ was certainly in no need of it.

21 June 201421 June 2014

Solstice

In Australia, winter officially begins on the first day of June, but elsewhere the change of season occurs on the solstice. Whichever way you want to mark the coming of winter, today is a beautiful day: currently a mild 16°C, clear skies, a slight nip in the air, warm in the sun. The sun rose at 7:00, solar noon occurs at 11:57 (when the sun will be a touch more than 152 million kilometres away), and then, less than ten hours of daylight later, the sun will set at 16:54—still the afternoon, really. Today’s solstice occurs at 20:51. And not surprisingly, there is a typeface called Solstice.

18 June 201418 June 2014

Danger

I can see that I’m not going to get much done today. There are workers next door, and although there is a fence between me and them, they are still only a couple of metres away. They’re using power tools and talking (in bogan) about what they had for breakfast. All of that’s ok, part of city living, but what really drives me to distraction is the radio station they’re listening to. I listen to music while I work too, but there is something about the sound frequency of commercial radio stations broadcast from tinny tradie radios, the inane chatter of ‘upbeat’ announcers, the lowest common denominator talkback, and the ads, which drill through my head as if I’m plugged into this electricity portal.

15 June 201415 June 2014

What Katy Did

I am extremely honoured to be the winner of the 2014 Biblio-Art Award. The Biblio-Art brief was to take an existing book—my book was What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge—and to create an artwork which both used and referenced the book in some way. I chose to make an artist’s book, and there is more about it under Artist’s books.

The edition I had to work with was quite old—I’m not sure of its exact age, but it was produced by Purnell and Sons, a family-run printing company that was based in Somerset, England, from 1839 to 1964. Typographically, it was not particularly easy on the eye. It was set in Times on 10pt leading. The type size, as close as I could measure it, was 9.5 or 10pt, making it a little too tight for comfortable reading. Book typesetting has come a long way since then, and typefaces like Electra, Janson Text, Garamond and Caslon, with a little more air in the leading, are used more effectively.

12 June 201412 June 2014

Disc

I wonder how such soft textures and colours can be at one with such a hard substance as a granite block. It seems like the melding of paint and rock into more than the sum of its parts is something that can only happen over time when it is ignored and neglected.

9 June 20149 June 2014

Perpetua

Perpetua was designed by Eric Gill in 1928 for Stanley Morison, typographic advisor for Monotype Corporation. Morison had a twofold plan for the growth of the Monotype library: the first stage was to develop modern interpretations of classic designs for machine composition; and the second stage was to develop new designs, which is where Gill came in. The design and release of Perpetua was fraught with complications. Gill was openly disdainful of mechanical devices (which included the Monotype typesetter), and Monotype’s management was conservative, and hostile towards Morison’s ideas. Then the project was put on hold because it was considered that a new sans serif design was more urgent than a new book face. Perpetua was finally released more than seven years after Gill was first commissioned to start work on it.