#79

#79, Ringstrasse, Vienna

There's something irresistibly European about the 7 with a slash through it. It's rare to see it pop up on this side of the Atlantic and it usually appears only in handwriting to differentiate it from the handwritten 1. I had a brief phase some time ago where I gave the 7 a whirl in my own correspondence, just to see if it lent me that certain old school European je ne sais quoi. The gesture was enthusiastic but short-lived, the handwriting equivalent of dyeing my hair with Manic Panic, or like the three weeks where I decided to add the French accents over the "e"s in my name. Most of these re-inventions die out mercifully quickly. The slashed-seven, alas, does not routinely flow from my quill. But when I see one looking as good as this 79, I want to kick-start the pretension all over again.

But back to the EU. Taking the idea further, there's a striking stylistic similarity between the 7 and the euro symbol, officially adopted in 1997. It could be coincidence, but here's food for thought. According to the European Commission:

Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) – a reference to the cradle of European civilisation – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro.


The creation fable is disputed - aren't they all? - by graphic designer Arthur Eisenmenger, who claims to have developed the symbol a quarter century before. Still, it's impossible not to admire the simplicity of the design as well as the consistency with not just the 7 but also other currencies. Beside the euro, the pound and the yen also use horizontal lines. (Though as a devotee of the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks , I'm skeptical of the commission's claim that drawing = through the letter C will "certify" economic stability.) The quest for the ideal typographical icon is spreading to other countries and regions as well. Driven by money-grubbing motives Inspired by the elegance of the euro sign, designers are working right now to develop a currency symbol for the Indian rupee . Sharpen those pencils and break out the Moleskines, folks. The Indian government wants you.

But the question remains - and maybe my readers can help me out here - what is that little slash through the seven called? I found myself Googling all versions of "7," "squiggle," "slash," "typography" and consulted an article on the excellent I Love Typography site. Serifs, counters, ascenders, descenders, spines, stems, terminals and ligatures: there's a word for every part of a typeface. Everything, it seems, except the 7. If there are any typographer lurkers out there who can enlighten me, by all means. In the meantime, I'll open the question to my language lovers (you know who you are): if you had your druthers, what would you name the squiggle through the 7? I'm putting in my vote for the Euroslash. But hey, this is a democracy, right?

#78

#78, Dublin

#77

#77, train between Vienna & Budapest

In one of the dozens of black binders laying about my apartment, enclosed in a rope-tie envelope, is a clipping from very old issue of Print magazine. The article is called "Trainspotting." While it's just as likely that at the time the article appeared, I was avidly clipping magazine pictures of Ewan MacGregor for his role in the movie by the same name, the article is in fact about trainspotting itself: the odd pastime of watching trains and obsessively remarking on the serial numbers, details, and arrival and departure times. It's what I would spend all my days doing if I was, in fact, an eccentric British man living in, say, Leeds with a walking stick and two mangy dogs who could get away with that sort of thing. In fact, I think all of this number & typography business of mine is just a gateway drug.

The article, written by the designer Philip Krayna, is part photo essay, part meditation on the pleasures of observing not trains in general but more specifically, the typography of railway cars. At the time that I clipped it, I had no interest in photographing numbers or writing about type and space and buildings or trains, but it spoke to me. For who knows what reason, I fell in love with this article and Krayna's accompanying photographs, many of which resemble this 77. I hadn't thought of the article in years. I wonder now if I had it all along in the back of my mind and didn't even realize its influence. It's strange to find the seed of a project that dates back so far. (Was it seven years ago? Ten?) I wanted to share an excerpt from the article here:

My fascination with railroad typography began a few years ago when my car overheated on a desolate stretch of highway in California's San Joaquin Valley. While I waited for the car to cool down, I wandered to a nearby railway siding that paralleled the road.

As I moved among the rows of massive steel boxcars parked on the train tracks, I discovered a larger-than-life specimen book of curious and corroded letterforms. Stenciled onto the sides of the train cars were words and symbols, numbers and safety warnings. They were rusted, repainted, and retouched to create unexpected compositions of type and color. Time and the elements had further worn these letters, and sometimes their messages were cryptic or indecipherable. One boxcar, scrawled with mathematical calculations, had been used as a giant blackboard, perhaps for the trackside reckonings of a brakeman.

. . . More than a hundred years ago, Warner Bailey, a clerk working for the Boston and Maine Railroad, noticed a plethora of lettering styles painted on boxcars. As he traveled throughout the Northeast on business trips, he sketched the various ampersands he saw during his free time. He counted more than 140 type styles, which he meticulously copied into his notebook like an industrial-age scribe.

I would love a glimpse of that notebook of hand-drawn ampersands.

Krayna's article is beautifully written, and the article's pictures are no less beguiling. I'd link to it but, ya know, these were them dark ages. In the meantime, my mind will turn over certain phrases and store them away for future blog titles once I've moved on to my true calling, when typespotting gives way to trainspotting: "Curious and Corroded." "Trackside Reckonings of a Brakeman." And so on, and so on.

#76

#76, Greenwich Village, NYC

After yesterday's assault on the eyes, a return to good taste. And then you realize: it sure is nice to look at, but there isn't much to say about symmetry, beauty, and good taste, apart from "Well done! What good taste! Tasteful! Impeccable!" Hmm. Could it be that we, in a backwards way, need the eyesores to give us perspective and keep the city alive and interesting? Or should we keep our architecture beautiful and leave that dubious job to the city-dwellers?

#75

#75, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

Doors like these are the architectural equivalent of that "when I am an old woman I shall wear purple" poem, your neighborhood's own equivalent of the old dear tottering around in a "red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me". On the one hand, you want to applaud the old broad for not giving a toss what the world thinks of her gobbling up samples in the shops and pressing the alarm bells at inappropriate times. On the other, you want to scream in her ear: "Stop pressing the alarm bells! Terrible shirts are not life's answer to sticking it to the youth-obsessed establishment! Sit down! You are making my eyes hurt!" So you may think similar thoughts as you pass your own neighborhood's "unique" door, sign, lawn ornament, or window decoration.

Lovable eyesores. Every neighborhood has them. I can think of dozens of these from my daily walk: the giant plush German shepherd dog in a window on Clinton Street, the bloated inflatable seasonal displays that decorate the apartment on Sackett Street, this duo of hue-screamers on Bond Street. Then you get, a few paces down, this more sedate, subdued, inexplicably dull chocolate-dipped 75C. It is as if the building had been firmly instructed to tone it down and the owner painted the remaining door the blandest shade imaginable:

Interestingly, it is often the eyesores that I remember most from my youth: that giant 50 near my doctor's office, my next door neighbor's 2-car garage decorated with "HIS" and "HERS" (the clincher was that - the store must have run out of "I"s - the "HIS" half of the garage was actually labeled "H1S". There was also a bright pink barn that was Klemm's nursery.

I'm curious to know: When you think about your own neighborhoods, past and present, what are the lovable eyesores you see? And do you mostly love them or despise them for daring to be, er, unique?

#74

#74, Denmark St, Dublin

In the wake of my recent Lynch & Sons post and subsequent giving out about the "vanishing" Irish pub, I've since ransacked my photo archives for more examples of old pub signs. Imagine my delight when I found this 74 with the barely-visible Joyce lurking on the outskirts. This picture dates back to when I was a number-hunting teetotaler and having a number peripheral to the rest of the picture was considered acceptable, the equivalent of having a single glass of wine along with the rest of the party. But now I'm back to my habits, all shame has flown out the window, and any excuse to talk about the Irish pub or Joyce will bulldoze any of the other 74s in my collection faster than you can say obsessive-compulsive.

A new book has just come out called A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. It's written by Bill Barich, a Yank like myself living in Dublin, which leads me to believe once more that the only people in the world who care about the "authentic Irish pub" are us silly, romantic Americans who were forced to watch The Quiet Man every year on St. Patrick's Day and lament why things aren't like the good old days that we were never around to witness in the first place. So be it. But I've got bigger fish to fry today. I'm not talking just about the pubs. I'm talking about typography.

A review of the book appears in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, and I was further affirmed in many of my suspicions that whatever an authentic Irish pub may be, it's dying out. To be accurate, it's not dying out so much as being transmogrified into a poor-Guinness-pouring, overly commercialized, nostalgic monster with nightmare spawn in just about every continent. James Oliver Cury writes in his review of the book:

But as rural pubs are dying in the motherland, the concept has become a hot commodity around the world. The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has built about 500 bars in 45 countries. Their advice: Add an "& Son" tag to make your place sound older. The multinational drinks conglomerate Diageo-Guinness sells Irish Pub Concept (I.P.C.) business plans. And statistics show that more stout is now sold in Nigeria than in Ireland.

Just as I suspected. Ye olde ampersand is being roundly pimped as a bona fide sign of authenticity and tradition, the typographical mark of the good old days when wakes were held in pubs and businesses were passed down in the family.

It's not that I have a serious vendetta with the idea of an "Irish Pub Concept" business plan. Let them build their little glossy paens to the old-fashioned past. (Mess with the quality of my Guinness, on the other hand, and you have a complaint coming.) Instead, let all of this eye-rolling awfulness allow us to appreciate those examples that do remain. There is a charm to the hand-painted sign with its three-dimensional shading, garish colors, and inconsistent spacing. Unless that's the next piece of advice in the Irish Pub Concept.: "Oh, and be sure to make your sign a bit wonky and paint your letters in 3 ugly shades." Sure I wouldn't put it past them.

#73

#73, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

I've written before about ghost numbers -- those eerie background figures that haunt the space near other, more prominent numbers. They're a familiar sight in Prague and Venice, where street numbers have done some shuffling over hundreds of years. But it's unusual to find one in Brooklyn. This slapdash 73 would fall into the "Oh well, what the hell" category, to quote McWatt from Catch-22. Look at it. They didn't even try to make it fit in or bother covering up the original 111. It looks like the handiwork of a disgruntled super and a bottle of Wite-Out. Anyone have suggestions for what could've been done instead?

#72

What do you do with leftover numbers? You make a game, of course! This diversion was inspired by the How well do you know Dublin? thread over at Archiseek, which has provided me with many enjoyable hours of time-wasting and speculation. Can you match each number to its city? For fun, I'm throwing in a city that isn't pictured. I believe this is what the Car Talk guys call pre-obfuscation. Your options are &7 favorite hotspots: Brooklyn, Budapest, Dublin, and Prague. I'll post the answers at the end of the week. Till then, guess away!

a)

b)

c)

#71

#71, 5th Avenue, NYC

A few months ago, I finally indulged my geekery and saw Gary Hustwit's Helvetica, a documentary about yes, the font. It was one of two feature-length documentaries on my list last year; the other was Man on Wire, the story of French daredevil Phillippe Petit's walk on tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center. The concept behind Petit's endeavor defied imagination; the notion of the first was radical only because it proposed something even more daring: a long look, in this jump cut culture, at something static and ordinary.

Does anyone else remember watching those public television documentaries as a kid, the ones that would show you how potato chips were manufactured? I can recall being riveted by watching vivid images of crayons whizzing by on a conveyor belt, feeling supremely privileged that I was getting some kind of insider's view of how things were made. For about a week, I couldn't look at a crayon without feeling my head swell with this amazing glut of information. Crayons -- they had this whole other life, this history, this fantastic creation story. When someone asks us to look closely at something very ordinary, whether a box of crayons or a font, it changes how we see the world around us. The pleasure of watching Helvetica comes from this altered perception: how one small thing in our lives can take on greater, global meaning when we stop not just to look, but to see.

The idea to make the film came to Hustwit as was wandering the streets of New York City. And Helvetica is everywhere in New York. It's used on all the subway station signs. And it's hard to miss this oversized black and white #71 on Fifth Avenue. After you see the film, you start noticing Helvetica everywhere: in ad campaigns, on flyers, on book covers. I'd watch it all over again if only for Michael Bierut's syntactically quirky, brilliant rants and Tobias Frere-Jones's allusion to a nightmare about serifs. Also of note: Bierut reviews the film and Frere-Jones discusses his font, Gotham . (In this outtake, you can check out the famed font collector's Mac screen view at 1:20, which is what my iPhoto would look like if my obsession with numbers was even more grandiose.) But one idea that has stayed with me is this one from the influential designer Massimo Vignelli:

The life of a designer is a life of fight, fight against ugliness . . . just like a doctor fights against disease.

What gives the movie its bite is the highly opinionated, often very funny commentary on the uses of typography. Helvetica, a basic, no-frills, modern font, is highly polarizing. After watching it, you may have to ask yourself difficult, existential questions like: am I a serif person or am I sans? Which font, if any, represents you best? And where, as you look around, do you see yourself most in this clustered, overcrowded world?

#70

#70, Conway's, Dublin

The authentic Irish pub, like the famous original New York City pizza, is an experience sought far and wide. It beckons to the avid guidebook thumber like a holy grail; it promises, in a very pre-packaged and safe way, to deliver exactly what one expects from it, nothing more and nothing less. To some extent, we're all guilty of this. We go to a place to get a certain experience: a sidewalk cafe in Paris, a glass-blowing factory in Venice, a distillery in Scotland, a brothel hash bar den of iniquity wooden shoe factory in Amsterdam. The experience feels a bit like picking up Value Meal #3 from the drive-thru window, but let's face it: our vacation days are scant and as much as we'd like to linger for months and write uplifting memoirs about eating, praying, and loving, most of us have to cram. This is why we laugh at the person who goes to a McDonald's in Paris. (I was in my twenties! I was broke! There, I've said it.) This is also why the clever advertising people who tell us what we want and why we want it sculpt signs to make life easier for us, placing them in strategic locations throughout cities that say reassuring things like "Dublin's Oldest Pub", "Famous Original Ray's Pizza", "Birthplace of the Blues", or the ponderous "Where the heck is Wall Drug, South Dakota?" which I've seen in places as far away as Holland quite near a wooden shoe factory. We're told where to get the archetypal slice or perfect pint and we go there. Simple, right? Except when it isn't.

Now looking for authenticity in an Irish pub sign that is there solely to claim its authenticity is a fool's errand in the first place. But when I noticed the bold claim "Dublin's Oldest Pub" underneath the 70 of Patrick Conway's on Parnell Street, I paused. The Brazen Head, as far as I knew, had sunk its claws into that singular claim. Indeed, I did a bit of research and it would seem that history sides with the Brazen Head. True, Conway's was established in 1745, which is ancient in New York years, but the Brazen Head was serving the good stuff even before the liquor licenses started in 1635. Then if you want to really stretch it, evidence shows that there was a tavern on the Brazen Head's current site at 20 Bridge Street as far back as the 12th century. Sorry, Conway's, but in my book, the Brazen Head wins.

Back to ye olde 2009. Conway's appears to be closed. It's facing a slew of legal battles and is threatened to be swallowed up forever into the belly of a shiny new shopping center scheme on the site of the old Carlton Cinema. With that fate in mind, we'll forgive them their dodgy "oldest pub" claim. Eulogies for the beloved pub are already being written . But perhaps nothing was quite so alarming as when I found this ill-translated "fact" about Conway's. Readers, pay close attention:

Established since 1745, Conway's is one of the last surviving pubs in Dublin.

And you thought our recession was bad! Here Conway's stands, one of the last surviving pubs in Dublin, and the damn thing's been boarded up for months. I really do need a drink.

Now I've never not gone into a place because it wasn't the oldest pub or the famous original Ray's pizza or whatever. But I do find the modesty refreshing in a place that claims to serve "probably the best coffee in Dublin" or "probably the best pizza in Dublin". Or take Carlsberg (if you must). This, of course, has been "probably the best beer in the world" for as long as I can remember. You can thank Saatchi and Saatchi for the false modesty behind the Carlsberg campaign, but in the others, I see humility and humbleness. I think to myself, I will probably try this someday. I don't expect to see any "probably an authentic Irish pub" or "maybe this is an original Chicago hot dog, but we're not entirely sure" ad campaigns aiming at today's consumers. It's probably for the best.