Underground signs

Cabbie Blog sends us a neat series of London underground station signs accompanied by some fascinating anecdotes. Whoever would have worked out that there’s only one station on London’s underground system which contains none of the letters in “mackerel”? I suppose some crossword enthusiast forgot their newspaper that day and had to stare at the train map for their entire commute.

The typeface used for these signs was famously designed by Edward Johnston in 1916. BBC News informs us that the typeface was recently updated and is now called Johnston 100. According to Transport for London the revised design “contains subtle changes to make it fit for purpose in the 21st century”. The biggest changes seem to be the addition of @ and # symbols, and adjustments to the lower case “g” — clearly all vital components of our digital world. The changes to the “g” actually mark a reversion to the early drawings made by Johnston, giving it back its original diagonal lower bowl. Here’s the new one (blue) overlaying the old version.

In 2019 a memorial was erected at Farringdon Station honoring Edward Johnston and the underground alphabet.

Photo Typeroom

 

Invoices

OK-ing invoices is the dullest part of the job. Everything’s finished, and we’ve moved on; the book’s beautiful, and it looks like it’s selling well. Now here comes this list of numbers. Just get it paid already!

Slow down. Invoices may be the dullest bit of your job but they are quite possibly the most important part.

Consider the problem that carefree invoice approval might cost you your job. You are dealing with the company’s money, and however dull you may think it is, you must make sure that that money is not being thrown away. In larger companies there will no doubt be approval levels: the holder of job X can approve an invoice up to $10,000, but above that needs to go to the boss, who may need to go up the ladder at $75,000 or whatever. But if the bit of paper starts with you, then the chain of responsibility starts with you.

If there’s an estimate, check the invoice against the estimate. And that doesn’t mean just glancing at the bill and saying to yourself, “Well, that’s pretty much what I expected”. Take out the job file and compare the two bits of paper. If there’s a discrepancy, check into the reason why. You may be able to work this out for yourself, but if you need to call the supplier, call the supplier. If there is a significant error you should request a revised invoice; smaller and maybe you can settle for a subsequent credit  — though the larger the company you work at the less acceptable this is likely to be.

Whatever you do, make a written note of it. This is important, especially if you end up accepting the charges. You have to ensure that your actions cannot be (mis)interpreted by some later observer — like say, the auditors — as potentially crooked. It may come as a shock (it certainly did to me) to discover that not everyone working in book publishing is absolutely honest. I still insist that by and large they are: if you really want to skim off the top of fake invoices, then you’d be much better advised to go into an industry where the bills are bigger! But we do rarely, rarely, hear of publishing people fired for such infractions. Not only must Caesar’s spouse be above suspicion; they must also be seen to be above suspicion. From the other end of the telescope your carelessness may look a lot like graft.

Bigger companies will have scales with their suppliers. Check the scale against the invoice. It is of course unlikely (I’d maintain impossible) that a supplier will wittingly try to deceive you by billing a 5½” x 8¼” book on the 6″ x 9″ scale, but mistakes can happen — and you are the one whose job it is to detect them. There can be few experiences more embarrassing than having the accounts department call you about such an error on an invoice which you’ve approved. If a supplier makes the same sort of billing error more than once or twice, maybe the time’s come to consider a change of supplier.

As a pretty straightforward check I used to enter the invoiced costs on the same sheet on which we had done the costing we’d used to make the print run decision. At the end, dividing the total of the invoices by the total number of books delivered would give you a clear check as to how you’d preformed against estimate. As a side benefit, this procedure would of course immediately throw into salience any invoicing error of the type discussed above which you’d managed to miss.

And do bear in mind that prompt payment of invoices is a vital component of good service: printers are loth to give priority to jobs from people who they know they’re going to have to sue to get paid. So approve your invoices promptly.

If all this isn’t enough to make you pay attention to invoices, consider that your overly-careless approval of excessive costs might lead to your boss losing their job too. Everyone’s got too much to do, and double-checking the work of employees whom you trust is one of the things one is most likely to skimp on. If you are trusted, you have an obligation to earn that trust every day.

Patience and Fortitude™

The New York Public Library’s lions, named Patience and Fortitude*, who sit calmly observing the bus stops in front of the main branch at 5th and 42nd, have had their patience rewarded and are now being provided with some reading material.

This is all part of the Library’s 125th anniversary celebrations. Scroll down to the bottom of that page to find a nice gallery of old photos of libraries and librarians.

Patience and Fortitude are no dummies. You could do a lot worse than work your way through the 125 books NYPL loves. There are quite a few surprises.

Renew you library card today.

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* Can’t tell them apart? Patience is to the south reading Beloved, and Fortitude, more uptown, is studying The Great Gatsby. They were first nicknamed Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after the library’s founders, but in the thirties Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia renamed them for the qualities he thought New Yorkers would need to survive the depression. And have needed since then, I guess, including the qualities required to read your library book while standing on one of those downtown busses.

The lions are trademarked by the Library.

POD = Pretty Obvious, Dummy?

Can there really be publishers who are still reluctant to set up their books for print-on-demand manufacture? Mike Shatzkin’s latest post suggests there are. He claims none of the Kobe Bryant books was in stock when that helicopter crashed, and none had been set up for POD. Can there really still be publishers who think it’s better to make no sale at all than to make a sale at a margin slightly lower than what they think their profit margin “ought” to be? When, as a sort of evangelist of POD back in the early nineties, I used to talk to publishers about the new concept of print on demand, the biggest hurdle I had to help them over was “But the unit cost is so high”. I used to go through the argument (which seems so obvious that you’d almost think it’s not worth the breath you have to expend to state it) —

• If you have a copy in your warehouse, you can fill an order.
• If you don’t you can’t.
• If your net margin on that sale is $2, not the $6 it once was, are you really better off not selling the book?
• In other words is $0 better than $2?
• Are there any books you’ve decided you can’t afford to reprint (i.e. for which demand is insufficient to support a reprint at an “affordable” quantity)?
• Answer, always and inevitably, “Yes. Lots.” [That’s what publishers used to call “out of print”.]
• So if there was a way of filling an order for one of these lost books would it not be a good thing to do, as long as you took in more than you spent filling the order?
• Well, yes — but that’s not possible.
• What do you think I’m talking to you about?

Before I retired, now surprisingly long ago, we were already setting up lots of books for POD on the just-in-case basis. If we anticipated erratic demand we’d have the POD version to fall back on if we went out of stock in the warehouse for a few days. Who’d think that the world’s second-oldest university press would be in the forefront of modern business practice? (The world’s oldest was right in there too.) University presses have perhaps been readier to adjust to the one-off model because they are used to higher unit costs anyway. They never got to print hundreds of thousands of copies of a book, and so would never get used to tiny unit costs. If you’re used to $4, $7 is not too much of an imaginative leap. But if you live below $2 you may worry that $7 is so wild as to be suicidal. But this means that that $15 book just never gets sold. And of course a publisher always has the opportunity to raise the retail price to meet increased costs — actually it’s more of an obligation than an opportunity.

There are three other obstacles to setting up your books for POD manufacture. It does cost something to set a book up for print on demand. The other two obstacles are related: publishing people, especially manufacturing people, have polished careers on getting books efficiently printed and delivered on time. Giving up this skill for automated resupply looks a bit like a career threat. Secondly: the POD book looks different. It’s printed digitally, not by offset. But I would argue that customers are not trying to buy those Kobe Bryant books because they want a beautifully printed book. They are buying them because they want read them. Let them do so!

Just about the only people who agonize about the look and physical quality of a book are employed by publishing companies.

See also Print-on-demand and POD quality.

Coated or uncoated

Coated paper or uncoated paper; that is the question. Here are two versions of Picasso’s “Three Dancers”. The first is printed on coated paper, the second on uncoated paper. Of course, given the color differences it’s clear (and almost inevitable) that they were created from different original photos. The first is Colorplate 77 from H. W. Janson’s History of Art, Prentice-Hall & Abrams, Revised and Expanded Edition, 18th printing 1974, printed in Japan (by Toppan?). The second is from Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting, Thames & Hudson Fifth Impression 1963, printed by Jarrolds in Norwich.

It’s hard to tell from my photos but the uncoated, Thames & Hudson version is much softer, warmer, and less “dramatic”. It may well be it’s a better representation of the original than the sharper, more highly defined Janson picture. There is a loss of detail in the black/brown of the right hand dancer, but the flesh tones look a lot healthier. Strangely it has lost the signature in the lower lefthand corner. But without lugging both books to the Tate, how could you know for sure which is more representative of the original?

What is certain is that the Janson version is more expensive. It is printed with a finer screen on a coated paper and is bound in as an insert in this student text intro to art. The Read version is printed on the text paper, and the book looks like it was part of an international co-edition series of runs.

In these details, Janson left, Read right, you can see the halftone dots. A neat rosette pattern in Janson, and a less obvious pattern in Read. But notice the size of the dots of red and black ink up the left hand side of the Read detail. This is a consequence of two things: the screen value — because it’s on a smoother paper the Janson can have a finer screen thus smaller dots and more of them — and partly because, being on a rougher cartridge sheet, the ink on the Read image has been absorbed into the paper more than the Janson which has gone for the ink hold out that can be achieved with fine screen halftones on coated papers. The reason we print on coated paper is so that we can show more detail. We can show more detail because with a coated paper we can use a finer screen, and the coating on the paper will allow the ink to sit more on the surface of the paper rather than sinking into the paper (and expanding ever so slightly). This has become such a convention that we now tend to react with surprise to a color halftone which isn’t printed on coated paper. Just about the only color you’ll find nowadays on an offset sheet (uncoated) will be in children’s books, and is often in line drawing form, not reproductions of photographs. As such the color involved will tend to be solids, not halftone dots.

The amount of blue and pink in the Read image is striking, and no doubt is explainable by differences between the original photos.

But which is more like the original? Here’s the Tate’s on-line version of the painting:

The Three Dancers 1925 Pablo Picasso 1881-1973 Purchased with a special Grant-in-Aid and the Florence Fox Bequest with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society 1965 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00729

Whether this one is true-to-life or not is impossible to say: indeed as I explored in another post, there’s no real true-to-life version of any reproduction, since what anyone sees when looking at anything is not some absolute value but a reflection of light, and (obviously) light will change from say 11 am to 11 pm, or even from 11 am to 11.15 am. But one has to say that, despite the money spent on the Janson printing, the Read version looks a lot closer to the Tate’s version, which I have to assume is not a million miles off perceived “reality” regardless of the weather.

Our friend Ilene loves the warmth and slight fuzziness (or lack of sharp definition) of color halftones printed on an offset (uncoated sheet). She cuts them up and uses them in her art projects. This post is addressed to her.

One might conclude that, despite what we may have gained, we have certainly lost something valuable by insisting on always using finer screens and coated paper for our halftone reproductions of fine art, or indeed of any photographs. Striking effects can be achieved by printing four color halftones on an uncoated sheet.

Memoir

Self-reflection is a basic part of writing a memoir. Self-regard is the pitfall awaiting the self-indulgent author of a memoir.

Witty picture from The Millions, Pulp Nonfiction.

“Write what you know” — maybe because everyone says it — is a piece of advice attributed to many originators. Whoever may have first said it, it can’t be true, or at least can’t be sufficient. No harm in writing about what you know of course, but no harm either in using your imagination. I always thought it was E. M. Forster who said it. Goodreads tells us it was Mark Twain. Literary Hub has a piece with advice from multiple sources dealing with the diktat. In the end, I conclude that almost everyone has said it: and far too many people seem to be taking the advice literally — the memoir is omni-present nowadays.

Remember the furore over James Frey’s memoir, which was discovered in 2006 to have been partly made-up? I find it hard to get too worked up about this. Do you really expect the whole truth and nothing but the truth in a book just because the publisher has labelled it non-fiction? After all who among us has perfect recall of what happened a few years ago let alone in early childhood? The mind can play tricks: even real memories can turn out to be made-up memories. I suspect that the appropriate attitude toward any memoir or autobiography is to suspect that some of the apparently firm details may in fact be wishful thinking.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read something described as a memoir. Maybe Shaun Bythell’s Diary of a Bookseller counts? Teffi’s Memories comes deceptively close, at least in its title. I suppose Partick Leigh-Fermor’s accounts of his European journey could be called memoirs. Is Walden a memoir? My feeling is that there’s something necessarily light-weight about memoir as against autobiography. If your life’s interesting enough, you can do an autobiography. If you think it’s only worth a memoir it might be better to keep quiet.* And is there any real meaning behind the category “creative nonfiction”? I suspect not. If you make it up surely it can’t really be nonfiction, can it?

Still, I suppose that we keep being offered memoirs because we keep buying memoirs. Can I link the rise in memoir as a literary form with the rise of social media? We live in a world where self presentation in “print” has become an every day activity. We’ll grow out of it I’m sure.

The Guardian has a piece about authors who have lied. Most touching is perhaps the story of a teacher who, finding a lack of available fiction about teenage immigrant Muslim experience to use in his classes, wrote his own. Which seems to have worked. His big mistake was to submit some of his fiction to the BBC, using a female Asian nom-de-plume. Success brought public scorn.

It is interesting to reflect along with The Guardian that “Memoirists who lie are often in breach of contract with their publishers. Novelists, however, sign a contract to promise that their book is lying.” However, I rather doubt that memoir writers really have to bind themselves contractually not to exaggerate or mis-speak: they’ve got to write something after all!

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* With slight embarrassment I have to confess to having written a memoir myself. It was basically designed to tell my granddaughters what it was like to be a child in Scotland in the forties and fifties of the last century. And of course some of the posts in this blog are open to the charge of actually being memoirs, especially those located under the index heading “CUP memories”.

International co-editions

Advances in the technology of printing have made international co-editions a much less complicated process than they used to be.

When I was starting out in this business, co-edition production — basically the cooperative manufacture of the same book in different countries in different languages — was quite a big thing, and around the world there were publishers who became specialists in the sharing of origination and preparation for printing which such editions involved. The motivating rationale behind the idea was:

• origination of a color book is expensive;
• in order to amortize these up-front costs you need to print a large number of books;
• but if you print too many and end up with unsold books, you’ve just managed to lose your money in a different way;
• solution — print the English, the French, the German, the Italian, the Spanish, the Japanese, etc. etc. editions all at one time.
• In the last quarter of the 20th century many books were published which without this cooperation would never have seen the light of day.

Doing all or many of the languages simultaneously would mean that your overall print run could be huge: a printing press doesn’t care about the language expressed by the black ink it’s laying down. Unsurprisingly, coordinating the press runs and schedules for companies in different countries represented a large problem, and more commonly you’d end up with the various editions being printed in different countries from the same set of expensively originated four-color film, duplicated as necessary. With luck you might be able to run a couple of versions simultaneously, but as the largest saving in cost was on the origination, the dividing of the presswork didn’t represent a make-or-break loss. A cunning dodge would often be to have five bits of film, using two blacks, one carrying the illustration content and the other with the text only. The translated replacement text in the foreign language would be typeset to fit the space left in the original and then stripped in with the common pictures. Art books were a staple of this business, and in Britain Thames & Hudson were probably the biggest player. (Nowadays all this international production coordination has become less relevant: now you’d just share files.)

This cost-sharing technique was, however, not exclusively a post-World War II development. It has a history. This picture shows the aquatint discussed in my recent post of that title. (You can see detail of the picture there.) This is a really impressive bit of work, beautifully created and printed, but I find its content fascinating too. There’s an amazing amount of infrastructure work going on around us here in northern Manhattan at this time, and observing how nowadays even fairly small stacks of bricks are lifted by a specialized little crane stands in marked contrast with how it was done in the nineteenth century. Could three horses really haul that wagon? How on earth did the workers manage to maneuver the immense blocks off the cart? How long did it take to saw that stone?

Down in the bottom left hand corner we are informed that it was “Drawn & Etch’d by W. H. Pyne” and in the middle it reads: “London Pub’d Jan 7 1823 by R. Ackermann 102 Strand”. (You can click to enlarge.) In his The Printed Picture from which this picture is lifted, Richard Benson informs us that the aquatint was made by J. Hill, and suggests that Ackermann published the plate in loose-leaf form. The book in which this aquatint was eventually published is Picturesque Groups for the Embellishment of Landscape (London: M. A. Nattali, 1845).

At the top you can see the title of the illustration “Masonry” at the left in English, and on the right in French “La Maçonnerie”. Given that the aquatint was printed in 1823 why did M. A. Nattali, the London book publisher, wait 22 years to publish the book? I wonder if there may not have been a French book in 1823 in which these illustrations were published, or at least that Mr Ackermann sold copies of the loose-leaf edition in France.

Lamination

Anyone who was around fifty years ago can probably remember the first attempts at laminating book covers. Exactly when this was is one of these things it’s difficult to establish with precision. I remember all the paperback covers in my early days in publishing as being without any kind of finish.

People of my generation will fondly remember the wonderful tendency of early cover lamination to de-laminate, allowing the bored reader to peel large strips of lamination off the cover. They’d come off along with a sort of neat shadow print of the cover as some of the ink came along with the peeled layer. This pastime had the same appeal as the later popping of bubble wrap.

In this picture you can see where the lamination has been stripped up the middle of the spine. Printed by Jarrold and Sons, Norwich in 1963.

And on Rosalind Mitchison’s history, below, you can see from the pitiful remainder of the lamination that all the red ink has come away when the lamination was peeled off. The little bit of lamination remaining with its red ink kind of suggests flames over Stirling Castle: a serendipitous reader contribution to cover design. The book is one of Methuen’s University Paperbacks reprinted in 1974 by Fletcher & Son Ltd. also of Norwich. (I don’t think lamination applied in Norwich was particularly prone to stripping!) Actually one can’t be sure Jarrolds and Fletchers did in fact print these two covers, though I think it’s highly probably they did. They certainly did print and bind the books, but back then, or very shortly later, we were to go through the beginnings of the separation of cover printing into a separate specialist business. Book historians beware: it’s impossible to know who printed a cover, except by examining the publisher’s archives.

The advent of lamination was doubtless a minor sort of event which nobody thought it worthwhile making a note about. I am finding it difficult to establish just when the event took place. I suspect it wasn’t till the sixties? I do have a Livre de Poche edition of La Princesse de Clèves which is laminated and claims to have been printed in 1961. Maybe it started earlier in different countries, though the Thames & Hudson one shown above dates from 1963. Britain has ever been a bit too wedded to tradition — and T & H as international co-edition specialists were especially open to overseas influences. That French cover was printed by letterpress, and you can see the lamination’s urge to become detached where the impression is deep.

The spine, as so often, is the weak point for delamination — all that folding and bending: it wouldn’t take too much to get La Princesse’s peeling going here. Which is also true of Hugh Williamson’s Book Manufacturing in its third edition from Yale University Press: this book reminds us that at one time we’d leave the jacket flaps unlaminated — not sure why; maybe to save the cost of the plastic roll. In the early days laminating covers was a bit like applying Saran Wrap/Cling Foil to a sheet of paper with a hand iron. Mr Williamson’s book shows the wrinkling which imperfect application would cause back then. (A nice Michael Harvey hand-lettered design.) The book was printed in 1983 at The Alden Press in Oxford: which is where Hugh Williamson was Managing Director, retiring that year. Maybe they did the jacket too, though they probably farmed it out locally.

There are two basic ways of putting a shiny (or matte) coating onto a jacket or cover: press varnish and film lamination. They can come in various finishes, gloss, matte and intermediate versions sometimes referred to as satin. Before we had lamination if you wanted to make a cover shiny your option was basically to print on a highly calendered shiny cover board. This can never get as shiny and impactful as lamination. The next best (and cheapest) option was to apply a press varnish. As its name implies this coating of varnish was applied by a specialized press. There’s a tendency for some of the varnish to be absorbed into the paper, and press varnish cannot provide the same pop as lamination. Lamination film comes in various types, with a stout polypropylene film as the topmost grade. For book covers lamination is applied using an adhesive, some pressure and some heat. It’d be hard to strip modern film lamination off a book cover: not sure which of the ingredients has improved since the early days: maybe all of them. Nowadays it has become possible and fashionable to combine press varnish and lamination: spot varnish enables you to highlight selected areas of the cover by printing on top of a film lamination.

Here’s a picture from Bridgeport National Bindery showing the same book with matte and gloss lamination. You pays your money and you makes your choice. Is it slightly amusing that we’ve had to invent a type of lamination which makes it look as if the book didn’t have any lamination? There is of course the protection element, and there is something really sensual about the feel of a matte lam cover.

We really spend the money to laminate a cover for marketing reasons: the impact of the cover is paramount, though it is true that the lamination also adds strength to the cover or jacket. Because the eye is basically seeing reflected light when it distinguishes colors, the brighter and more reflective a shiny surface is the more light it will reflect and so the more  intense any color will appear.

Because ink, unprotected by lamination or varnish, will tend to smudge and rub off, before we developed cover coatings book covers tended to be fairly simple. The shinier, more coated, the paper, the easier it is to wipe off the ink. You would hesitate to print a halftone on a cover for fear of its smudging — if it was printed on a coated paper which holds the ink on the surface more than an uncoated paper (which is what you’d want to do with a halftone), the tendency to rub will be even greater. Typographical layouts and solid blocks of color were the norm. Nowadays we assume trade jackets and covers are going to feature elaborate artwork: they can do this thanks to lamination.

Graphic Arts Magazine had a piece in 2011 comparing both methods.

 

Captions decision

I did a post last September about the lawsuit being brought by the Association of American Publishers against Audible because of its desire to use the text, generated by AI from their audio stream, as a sort of subtitle track to its audiobooks. The publishers argued that the text represents a copyright item not covered by the sublease of the audio rights. Now the lawsuit has been settled in the publishers’ favor says Publishing Perspectives.

This video demonstrates what Audible Captions looks like.

If you don’t see a video here please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

The case has been decided out of court, and under the terms of the settlement Audible agrees to obtain permission from the publisher (if that publisher is a member of the AAP) before applying the Captions feature to audiobooks. Amazon, owners of Audible, has agreed to extend the agreement to cover books published by any publisher, member of AAP or not — as reported by The Digital Reader. This means that if you see Captions when you are “reading” your Audible audiobook you can rest assured that, if it’s a copyright work, permission will have been granted by the publisher and that this will mean that some sort of payment has doubtless been made to the author.

This whole shebang may not constitute a massive advantage for the reading public. If you really want the text would you not be reading the book? If you want the audio, do you really need the stress of trying to keep up with the printed words? Obviously some will want to attend to both, but I wonder how many. No harm, of course, in such a service being available, as long as it’s being done within the limits of the copyright law. If you really want it, now you’ve got it, though there seems to be uncertainty about how much Audible’s going to use the feature. Reports suggest that Captions may actually only appear on books already in the public domain. Which may in itself be a comment on the actual value of this feature.

Fonts* turn words into stories

The Scholarly Kitchen sends us this TEDx talk by Sarah Hyndman whose website (plus associated blog) is called Type Tasting. Her message is that typefaces are not inert designs. They are a bit like clothing that words put on. People intuitively recognize that what they chose to wear affects others’ reaction to them — you don’t wear shorts and a T-shirt to a job interview — and we ought not to be too surprised that the same effects can be detected in typeface choice.

If you don’t see a video here please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

Ms Hyndman tells us of an experiment she conducted making several people each eat a (same flavor) jelly bean while exposed to one of two different typefaces. The typeface on the left is rounded and comfortable, the one on the right jagged and threatening. Subjects reported sweeter/sourer tastes depending on the typeface they were shown. Ms Hyndman informs us that there’s more research into this effect going on at Oxford. I suppose, if, as seems undeniable, the typeface on a printed piece can alter your reaction to a message, then the typeface you use to write something is likely to affect what you end up writing. (The Scholarly Kitchen does discuss this.) In this blog I address you in Arial, an unfussy, down-to-earth face, which perhaps suits my no-nonsense, bloke-ish affect. Arial is a face I spent a long time abhorring, mainly because it was used by Microsoft’s Windows (I’m a Mac maniac), but here I am using it. (Of course I didn’t actually spec Arial: I picked up and used a template provided by WordPress which happened to use Arial. But I did choose it didn’t I?) I sort of salve my conscience by thinking that it may actually be Helvetica (Arial was allegedly designed to mimic Helvetica and to provide the look of Helvetica without the license fee!) Actually my blog may in fact really be using Helvetica — detecting the difference is rather hard and is I fear beyond me. Other stuff I write uses Palatino, a much more traditional look. I don’t think I write differently in Palatino, but who knows. I expect there may well be slight differences. I did see a tweet from someone recently objecting to setting a Jane Austen novel in Times Roman, mainly I think on grounds of anachronism — but does the businesslike straightforwardness of Times Roman actually affect the reading? These Oxford researchers have lots of material to look into.

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not: Synesthesia rules — all the way down.

from Type Tasting blog

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* Ms Hyndman says “font”. Old-school sticklers might insist on “typeface”. See Font.