How The World’s Most Beautiful Typeface Was Nearly Lost Forever
Typographer Tobias Frere-Jones says that to devote your life to type, more than anything else you need to be very, very patient. For him, this career was the rare intersection of two others he couldn’t choose between: writing and painting, equal parts logical and emotional. He says that everyone is affected by type, even if they’re not consciously aware of it.
.. “It’s a lot like what costume designers do in films, dressing the characters in ways that quietly tell us about their personality.”
.. While Cobden-Sanderson had expunged every mention of Walker from his journals, he never hid the whereabouts of the type. There were enough details to work out where he was standing on the bridge at night: a 5-metre radius where he’d be concealed from police, oncoming traffic, and Emery Walker’s window.
“I went down on to the riverbed and within 20 minutes I’d found three pieces of type,” says Green. “It was near where I thought it was, but over a hundred years it had been pushed maybe 20 yards.”
.. In total, they found 151 pieces.
.. He’s added a further 290 characters to Walker and Cobden-Sanderson’s 100, because you can’t sell a font in 2016 without the @ symbol.