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February 26, 2007
Type IS everywhere!
Our homework assignment for this week's letterpress class was to look around at different kinds of type. Because, you see, type really is everywhere. So, I brought my camera along and took some photos while I was out with the dog.
This is from the scoreboard of the practice field at WC - notice Iggy sprinting to get in the picture at the lower right hand corner. There's nothing she likes more than being the star. Too little, too late, sucka.
The practice fields are right next to the cemetery. What better place to look at type than on gravestones? They're all about type, really. The interesting thing that I discovered was that the old tombstones had all the fun - interesting fonts, italics, decorative angels, heraldry and scrolls (though, I did see one modern one with a preening little kitten carved on it). In the twenties, sans serifs seemed to be all the rage, carved in as well as bowled out, but things got serious in the 30s and from then on it was strictly your standard serifs, without much imagination. Very serious stuff. I guess we're talking about death and all, so maybe fun fonts are sort of out of the question.
I'm going to get CURLZ on my gravestone, just to piss everyone off (especially the stonecarver).
These markers weren't for people but for the different sections of the cemetery. I'm not really sure what the designations necessarily mean (it doesn't seem alphabetical, anyway) but I liked how they were so different but nestled right up next to each other. Likely from different eras, but why?
And this is just a sign we saw in New York, right after complaining loudly about how ineffective horns are at convincing traffic to move forward. We're not horn-blowers, really. We're sit-and-cursers. It's much more satisfying, with like results.
Posted by ribbu at February 26, 2007 12:00 PM
Comments
The R's that you photographed are used to designate the corners of a plot and the initial probably refers to the last name of the owner of the plot. Lame that I know this, but there are a ridiculous amount of laws in regards to what you can and can't do in a cemetery. CURLS would be awesome. I was thinking, when I worked for the paper, how awesome it would be to run an entire headline in symbols. No one else thought that was nearly as funny as I did...
Posted by: Nifer at March 23, 2007 01:33 PM