My Type of Fiction
by Nick Gadd
In early October, an attorney connected with Donald Trump — John Dowd — sent a letter to Congress, stating that his clients would not be cooperating with the Ukraine inquiry. This would have been a news story in itself, but what set social media aflame was the font in which the letter was written: Comic Sans. Was Dowd showing contempt for protocol, and the Democrats? Or does he just like the font?
A couple of years ago, a story appeared in The Guardian about a scandal involving the prime minister of Pakistan, the Panama Papers, and the font Calibri. The gist of it was that documents related to the scandal, dated 2006, were typed in Microsoft Calibri, which was not available until the following year. The obvious implication was that the documents were forged.
The Dowd letter, and the so-called ‘Fontgate’ affair, marked two welcome appearances of typography in the headlines. I had been interested in type for several years and was writing a novel on the subject, Death of a Typographer, which I worked on at Varuna. I had long suspected that fonts provided rich possibilities for a mystery novel, and the Fontgate story confirmed it.
But there’s more to it than plot twists. While a writer’s relationship with type is a bit like a fish’s with water — we don’t discuss it, it’s just there — many of us have become much more font-aware since Steve Jobs put a plethora of typefaces onto every desktop. There are plenty of good non-fiction books about type, but as a novelist what interests me is how fonts can conspire with fiction.
Why write a novel about fonts? I’ve always been a sucker for private languages, and I love the lingo typographers use: glyphs, swashes, romans and ligatures are music to my ears. What are the differences between brackets and guillemets, hyphens and breves? Who knew that letters of the alphabet have ears, chins, tails and bowls? Then there are the evocative names of the fonts themselves, from Aldus and Caslon to Sabon and Zapf. If readers enjoy J.K. Rowling’s characters declaiming ‘Expecto Patronum’, then why wouldn’t they embrace the language of typography?
A second reason is that the world of type harbours obsessive individuals, the kind of people who fret over the exact shape of the dot over a letter ‘i’ (it’s called a tittle, by the way). There is something impressive about a person who would literally drop dead of shock on discovering a typographical error, as did the eighteenth-century poet Carlo Guidi — he was about to present his book to the Pope, so the stakes were higher than usual. Or take Arthur Stace, who wrote the word ‘Eternity’ countless times around Sydney, in exquisite calligraphy. Characters afflicted with typomania are gold for a novel. My protagonist, Martin Kern, is so sensitive to bad type — it gives him migraines — that he takes long detours on his bicycle to avoid ugly fonts in public places. The upside of his condition is an ability to crack typographical cases, like the one mentioned at the start of this article.
A third factor is what I’d call the spiritual dimension. There is something deeply moving about the quest for perfection. Surfers spend their lives in search of the perfect wave: why not, then, the perfect font, a set of glyphs so exquisite that their beauty may herald the end of the world? Such is the aim of my fictional Dutch design genius, Pieter van Floogstraten. Once I had conceived this notion, it didn’t seem far-fetched at all. It isn’t absurd to see a connection between the making of marks on a page, or the earth, or a wall, and spiritual truths (Arthur Stace again). Many religious traditions involve letterforms with sacred properties. Those tittles may be more important than we thought . . .
But if you don’t believe that a font can bring about the Apocalypse, or even if you don’t think about fonts much at all, maybe you’ll agree that letterforms carry resonances that speak to us on a deep level. Consider how the mastheads of some magazines convey sophistication and style (Harpers Bazaar, like countless high fashion brands, is set in Didot, with letterforms tall and aloof as a catwalk model), while chunky sans serifs scream tabloid mag. What will happen if you submit your poignant short story to a literary magazine in Comic Sans? There’s a reason that most novels are still set in some kind of classic serif like Garamond or Bembo: fonts like these have been used for centuries, and setting a book in them is a way of connecting with the literary tradition.
Having said that, there is room for experimentation, as long as it’s done knowingly, not by making random choices from the drop-down menu. There are millions of fonts out there: elegant and cheesy, flamboyant and austere, cool and sexy, retro and futurist . . . I asked Stephen Banham, a good friend and the designer of Death of a Typographer, to choose a different font for each chapter title (there are 26), to convey something of its tone. His selections range from the workmanlike Aksidenz Grotesk to the gorgeous French display face Peignot; the timeless classics Garamond and Caslon; the ghastly Graveblade and the wacky Bo Diddlioni; and, for the London chapter, a font familiar to all Tube travellers: Underground. Whether you pore over these fonts or merely glance at them, they add a subtle dimension to the pleasure of reading.
To a writer, of course, at the end of the day it’s the words that count. I’ve realised, though, that type does far more than simply carry the message — it’s not a neutral medium at all. Once we are aware of this fact, and start to notice the subtle ways that fonts work, it’s not just fiction that becomes more interesting — it’s the world. Perhaps that’s the best reason for paying a bit more attention to them.
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Nick Gadd’s novel Death of a Typographer has just been published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. He worked on the novel during a Second Book Fellowship at Varuna in 2018. Find him at nickowriter.com.