Letterform Collected

"It’s a collection devoted to a love of letters. Every month they asked a type designer or someone involved in the graphic arts to pick a letter in any font and describe why they like it. It’s a small format book and without any question it’s my favourite typeface book. It begins with five As, two Cs, five Gs and so on. My favourite A is actually the first one in the book, picked by David Quay, who I don’t know at all. He’s picked the Egyptian Bold Extra Extended A. They don’t all have long wacky obscure names. There is a Gill Sans G, for example. If you get type designers on a project like this, the risk is that they’re all going to go for the most obscure thing they can find and they’ll try to out-something each other and be as elitist as they can, but that’s not the case here. This Egyptian Bold Extra Extended A is something that comes from the 19th century and you see it on Victorian music hall posters, and it’s also a popular letter in early American wood type. They’re known generically as a ‘fat face’ because they are large, bold letters. In my book I describe them as letters you’d imagine seeing on the side of Victorian trains rushing past you with steam billowing out. They’d look great on the side of a boiler and you can read them even going past at speed. Each of the letters comes with a description by whoever chose them. “The cliché that you can’t judge a book by its cover is wrong. You clearly can and all you need is a book of cover jackets to prove it.” The A that follows it in the book is quite good – from a typeface that I absolutely love called Albertus, which is the classic face of Faber cover design – but the guy who picks this, Michael Bojkowski, says: ‘Since I’m a fully paid-up member of the type geek squad, you can imagine how having to choose a letterform to talk about is kind of mindboggling. Being the graphic glue that sticks the world together, typography is endlessly fascinating and the variety of letterforms seemingly infinite.’ That’s the point of this thing – it’s by people who love letters. It’s also got the pound sign and the interrobang – a mixture of the question mark and an exclamation mark. If you want to say ‘What the f***!?!’ you use that instead of having lots of exclamation marks and question marks. You have a symbol that does the whole thing."