1. ...Heinermann, a font long thought to have been created by Jan Peders van der Heinerman (1658-1702), who was a pioneering typesetter based in Antwerp, but since conclusively proven to have been invented by the Comtesse Madeleine d'Anjou, third wife of Germain (II), Comte de Paris, and filched from her by van der Heinerman's child bride, Genevieve Fleurement, as part of a complicated sexual triangle that some authorities believe may also have involved a goat. Which would make it a quadrangle, we suppose.

2. ...Sativa Monticello Roman, a font originally created by Thomas Jefferson, allegedly after a long night of hemp-induced visions in the arms of his mistress Sally Hemmings, in celebration upon the victory of American arms at Yorktown.

3. ...Chateauneuf du Pape Serif, a charming font with notes of oak and tannin, its present style codified and popularized in the typography of labels from vintners in Chile's Casablanca valley, but ultimately deriving from graffiti carved in ancient Druidic stelae, possibly by Roman legionaries, in the department of Vaucluse in France.

4. ...Cthonian Medium, a font generally credited to Unamit Ahazredit (1323-1348), known as "the Mad Armenian," whose calligraphy in the only extant Latin translation of the "Neopublicon," a work of obscure origin, served as the basis for the font used in Gustav Klimpt's print version of the same work (1672, Leipzig). Per legend, the ornate nature of the serifs used in this font themselves encode arcane knowledge, and assist in imparting whatever hidden and potentially dangerous message the text itself contains.

5. ...Berlow Historia Obscura, a font designed by Jurgen Berlow, one of the most prolific modern creators of faces. This body type is, so he claims, derived from a printed folio composed in Volapuk, an artificial language created by Johann Martin Schlayer in 1879; the manuscript was ostensibly discovered in an Etruscan tomb dating to the sixth century BC, and its pages have been radio-carbon dated to the middle Cretaceous. Some authorities consider this an amusing hoax and credit Barlow with this attractive type; Barlow, and the occasional crackpot, maintain that it is the product of time travellers from our future (when, presumably, Volapuk becomes the human lingua franca) back to the primordial past.

6. ...Derrida Plain, a font in which all characters are rendered as identical rectangular black blocks. Named after Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), this font extends his philosophy of deconstructionism, which holds that all texts have no meanings except for those constructed by their readers, to its logical extreme, by making the text wholly indecipherable, and therefore susceptible to whatever construction the reader desires.

N. ...ISO Latin ASCII, because humans are obsolete, and the only people who need to read such texts (presumably from some fit of nostalgia) are we machines.
posted by Greg at 2:39 AM 13 comments