Alphabet City Press

12 March 201311 March 2013

1926

The New Brighton Hotel on Manly Corso was built around 1879 but the 1926 that it so proudly displays marks the year it was redeveloped in the Egyptian style. Although the architecture does feature some Egyptian-inspired decorative elements, there’s nothing very Egyptian about the number. But it hardly matters! Manly was a prosperous place in 1926, and preparations for the Manly Jubilee were well under way. Plans included a Venetian Carnival, Jubilee Surf Carnival, Jubilee Grand Ball, Grand Jubilee Water Pageant, and even a visit by the Duke and Duchess of York. The royals never made it: instead, parties of naval officers were brought in as compensation. I don’t know what part the New Brighton played in all this, but I bet the bar was jumpin’!

9 March 20139 March 2013

Tea rooms

The weather has been warm and sunny and if this building had still housed the Ocean Beach Tea Rooms I would most certainly have stepped in for afternoon tea. The idea of tea rooms by the beach evokes some atavistic memory of the sound of the seaside on a hot day, the splish splash of gentle waves as they break onto sand too hot to stand on, the strangely lulling hubbub carried on the breeze. What surprises me about the signage, dated 1898, is how well it seems to work, despite there being so many things wrong with it from a typographic viewpoint. The sizing is wonky, the spacing inconsistent, and worst of all, every A is a different type style!

6 March 20136 March 2013

Fraction

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Taking a shortcut to avoid the lights led me past this magnificent fraction, although it’s not really a fraction but a warehouse unit and street number. It’s the highlight in a pretty ordinary stretch of factories, a stretch that is particularly quiet on the weekend when everything is closed. But this number is lively at any time: it shouts ‘look at me look at me’. And indeed I did! I like the scale of it, and the spacing — and I don’t know if it’s a slash, a solidus or a virgule, but whatever you want to call that obtuse line, this one certainly makes a statement.

3 March 20133 March 2013

8132

This reminds me of the work of Jasper Johns, whose use of commercial stencils transformed ordinary and commonplace shapes and symbols into works of art. Jasper Johns is probably most well known for his American flags, but in the 1950s he started using stencilled letters and numbers as the basis for his paintings, prints and drawings. He produced many variations of numbers: single numbers, grid patterns of repeating rows of numbers, superimposed numbers. He was interested in exploring the ways we see and why, and his work has certainly made a difference to my view of the world around me.

28 February 201328 February 2013

Mixed media wall

Here’s another one of those accidental wall works of art I like so much. Age, weathering, layers of worn paint, peeling paint, the splodge of mortar between the sandstone slab and the bricks. And on the left of the pinkish patch there’s some faint pencilled handwriting in the remnants of the plaster. I suspect it’s just some builder’s notes, but I like to think it is something more esoteric, a fleeting message lost in the passage of time.

25 February 201324 February 2013

The letter A

The letter A is the first letter of most modern alphabets, and in English is the third most commonly used letter (after E and T). Our modern A evolved from the pictogram of an ox which became the Phoenician letter aleph which became the Greek alpha. A represents many things: a musical note, number one, first rate, top service, the first and best. In typography the lower case a can be drawn in the open form or the closed form. Most typefaces use the open a, but some, such as Futura, Lubalin Graph and Stone Informal, use the closed a. Many typefaces retain the open form across all the weights (Helvetica, Gotham), but many others, including Garamond, Minion, Sabon, Gill Sans and Lucida, to name but a few, use the open form in the roman weights and the closed form in the italic.

22 February 201322 February 2013

Veterinary science

What strikes me most about this lettering, dated around 1910, is that it has been integrated into the whole facade and does not take second place to the row of animal heads watching over it and the stars of the southern cross flanking it. The ornate letters are carved into the sandstone lintel and painted gold, and what considerable skill must have gone into it. And I am impressed that it has been maintained in such excellent condition.

19 February 201317 February 2013

Asparagus

When I was 15 I got a job at the newly opened local Woolworths. Out the back, right next to the tea room, was a place that held enormous allure – the showcard and ticketwriting room. I started as a price chaser and made my way up the ranks to checkout chick, but neither job held the mystery and fascination of ticketwriting. I wondered if I could learn that secret writing style, but I never did. These days you don’t see it around so much, but one of my local grocers displays this fine example. It reminds me of a time, and I am pleased it is a skill that has not disappeared completely.

16 February 201316 February 2013

Grime

Despite the size of the writing on the brick wall it’s not immediately obvious from the main road because the Officeworks awning is in the way. I was taking a detour through the grounds of Sydney Uni and, as often happens when you go an alternative route, you see the same old things with a different perspective and new aspects of an otherwise familiar environment are revealed. I don’t know what the graffiti is about but I like the juxtaposition of the two sets of bold type on two equally strong backgrounds.

13 February 20139 February 2013

Nuts and mutton

An en dash is used to connect two things or denote a range, for example dates (13–14 June), places (Sydney–Hobart) and pages (22–33). An en dash is approximately the width of a lowercase n, and is also referred to as a nut dash. An em dash indicates a transition — or added emphasis — within a sentence — or an afterthought. An em dash can replace commas, semicolons, colons and parentheses to indicate an interruption or change of thought. An em dash is approximately the width of an uppercase M and is also known as a mutton dash.