Abstract

There is a joy in knowing the names of things – not the obvious names, the ones that everyone knows, but the special names… The ones that mean that you are an expert in your field. The ones that mean you have inside knowledge denied to those on the outside of your subject.

As a typographer, you may know the Truchet, the Fournier, and the Didot; you may know point sizes and Line sizes, and whether or not you’re a typographer, you now know the Great Primer, the English, the Pica, the Small Pica, the Long Primer, the Bourgeois, the Brevier, the Minion, the Nonpareil, the Pearl, and the Diamond.