Just Our Type

Every month Freight aims to give you a preview of one of our designer's favourite fonts. This week David Benjamin brings you...

Clarendon

Robert Besley, 1845

The Fann Street Foundry

Background

Named after Oxford's Clarendon Press, this was the first typeface to be patented under the Ornamental Designs Act of 1842. Unfortunately for designer Robert Besley, the patent only lasted 3 years and due to it's widespread popularity, was quickly copied by other foundries when it expired. 

The Clarendon typeface was originally designed to be used as a heavy face to highlight words in blocks of roman copy. This method of highlighting text had previously been done using italics and in the mid 19th century printers began to opt for the use of slab serifs as a means of creating hierarchy in the text. However, the downside of many slab serifs were that they could appear awkward and overly prominent. This led to the development of the Clarendons or Ionic letterforms, designed to sit in harmony with the regular roman typeface used for the copy.

Clarendon was often used as a display letter, appearing as side headings in dictionaries and famously used on American wanted posters. In more recent times, it was the typeface of choice for American National Park traffic signs.

Choice

Clarendon is one of my favourite slab serifs because it is a clean, strong typeface with a nice blend of straight edges and curves in all the right places. At first glance I would consider it a traditional letter form yet it surprises me how often it suits a more contemporary application. 

Some famous brands use Clarendon in their logo and it is pretty timeless. Sony are one such example; a company whose business and products are always trying to innovate and embrace new technology, they hold design in extremely high regard and it says a great deal that their logo has barely changed since its redesign in 1957. If it ain't broke, as they say...

The horizontal and vertical strokes of the letters are straight, the serifs are cut at right angles and the characters are quite wide creating an almost square appearance to them. This rigid framework provides a strength to the skeleton of the typeface that is otherwise fleshed out with curves. The fern shaped ear of the lowercase g, the strong sweeping spine of the letter s, the vertical swashes and tails that curl off the end of the characters and stand to attention are all distinguishing elements of Clarendon, making it impossible to hide its identity. This is what gives Clarendon its organic personality and as a result, why it lends itself well to use as a display face. Modern versions of the typeface include a light weight which has a surprising elegance and lends more versatility and subtlety to the bold original letterset.

Last week, Freight Books read...

A Happy Death. All the Birds, Singing has yet to arrive for me to read, so instead I have decided to mark this centenary of Albert Camus' birth by reviewing one - possibly my favourite - of his novels. This was the first book he wrote, yet it was not published until after his death, so I feel it lends a certain roundness to the centenary.

Much of the storyline would be familiar to those of you who have read L'Étranger, as it is very much a blueprint for this most famous of novels. However, I would have to say I prefer it - there is a youthfulness, perhaps even a naivety to this version, which I really enjoy.

In brief, the protagonist Mersault (for it is he, yet isn't he) is given the oppourtunity of a lifetime, the chance to have enough money that he need never work again, on the condition he concentrates on living. The only downside is that he has to kill a man (the man offering him the money, nonetheless). He does this, travels round Europe, gets horribly sick, returns to North Africa, visits the House Above the World (possibly the most perfect place that now exists in my imagination) then leaves there and dies. And it is a beautiful death.

At only 106 pages this is a very short, but oh so sweet, examination as to whether a happy death is possible. If only it could have been so for the man himself. If you've never read any Camus, I urge you to read this first. If you've read lots of his work but not this, you know how good his books are,  so just buy it.

The cover shown is the new Penguin edition. I can't decide if I like it and I think this is a bad thing, though it does make me think of swimming off the Algerian coast, which I have never done, so it must be good, right?

Last week, Freight Books read...

Death and the Penguin is wonderfully surreal. Victor, the protagonist, is a an aspiring writer living on his own in a flat in Kiev. Well, nearly on his own. There is also the Penguin, Misha, who Victor bought from the zoo when they were strapped for cash after the break-up of the Soviet Union. They live together quite happily, Victor feeding Misha frozen fish and Misha shuffling about sounding rather depressed. 

Then Victor gets a job writing obituaries for a newspaper and things change. Suddenly he has steady money, and even makes a friend or two, but the the people he is asked to prepare obits for start to die. Misha gets a job too, as a silent companion at funerals. 

If that hasn't got you intrigued then I don't know what is wrong with you. It is great. I've yet to read any more by Andrey Kurkov, but he has jumped to the upper reaches of my shopping list. 

Last week, Freight Books read...

From the Mouth of the Whale, by Sjón and translated by Victoria Cribb, will not be to everyone's tastes, but I found this to be a great read, filled with the visceral trappings of a time when Science and Magic were often thought to be the same thing. The year is 1635, and though Iceland is under the rule of Denmark it is a long way from anywhere. The main character, Jónas, has been exiled to a remote island off the coast of this remote island - just about as far as a man can be pushed without discovering a new continent. His crime is his intelligence (he is a self-taught healer), his heresy (a Catholic in a country where Protestantism has taken sway) and that he has earned the enmity of the local magistrate.

As he languishes on his island, he writes about his life, and through that we hear about the nature of the land. We learn of the deaths of three of his children, of the brutal murder of Basque fishermen, and of the harsh lives eked out on the edge of the world.

Jónas is then taken from his exile to Denmark, where opportunities suddenly flourish around him, but I don't want to give too much away here. There are some beautiful touches to this novel - the search for dead ravens in the hope of retrieving a life-giving stone from their heads (as reported in the classical texts of Paracelsu), the unveiling of unicorn horns sold throughout Europe to be the teeth of narwhal, and the exorcism of a walking corpse.

Victoria Cribb has done a brilliant job of  translating this book. It flows with lyrical poetry, but retains those harsh edges, like a sea wind blowing over marram grass.

I take it back, this should be to everyone's tastes because it is beautiful and brilliant.

Last week, Freight Books read...

War with the Newts is weird yet wonderful. Sold as a humorous allegory of early 20th Century Czech politics, I was expecting to have my knowledge of Slavonic history stretched to breaking point, but couldn't resist the title nor the cover artwork. If there were any specific references to Czech politics they passed me by. The novel contains allusions to the League of Nations, the slave trade, and imperialism, but you could get away with not knowing about any of those things.

A sea captain looking for pearls comes across a colony of giant newts. He teaches them how to protect themselves from sharks, and in return they collect pearls for him. This relationship soon becomes one of exploitation, as the newts are the perfect form of cheap labour, but as a new age of prosperity begins for mankind nobody notices how fast the newts are breeding...

On the whole a good read, which I banged through quickly. If it was to be your first foray into Czech literature, however, I would counsel you to read Closely Observed Trains, I Served the King of England, The Good Soldier Svejk or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.