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Font Activations: A Note on the Type
A note on the type
Whereas it’s easy to see why having a cover designed by socialist artist Ben Shahn made some conceptual sense — he began his career as an advocate for the rural poor, whom Lefebvre credits with enforcing by insurrection the juridical reforms proclaimed by the Constituent Assembly — but what does this noncommittal linotype face have to tell us about freedom and the rights of man and citizen? They all have the same general tone and format: an acknowledgment of the designer, a location of the typeface within the broader history of printing, and a brisk account of its aesthetic distinctions, with some highly specific details about the serifs, descenders, or weight of the strokes, as, for example, in this haughtily passive-voiced point from the note on the type of H.L. (“That part of the text not set in Backslap or Bangalore — the lowercase d's, k's, and alternate z's, except after c — is Jiffy-Lube Piscataway Light Narrow, based on a sixteenth-century face closely resembling the late Edward G. Robinson.”)
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