Month: July 2007

Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

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The trailer for The Golden Compass turned up this week, the first part of Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy, and I can’t help but note that the film’s designers have chosen Jonathan Barnbrook’s Mason font for the titles and the rest of the typography. This isn’t so surprising given that Mason has been used on the covers of several editions of the books already but I wonder if this flush of even greater popularity will spell (as it were) the end of a stylish typeface.

hdm.jpgMason (originally named Manson) was one of Barnbrook’s earliest published type designs, appearing in 1992 via the Emigré foundry, and over the past fifteen years has been widely imitated and become the default font for fantasy works, especially book jackets. The attraction for the genre is obvious in the way the design uses elegant and traditional serif letterforms that have been amended slightly to give them a distinctive quasi-ecclesiastical flavour, with flourishes derived from Greek, Renaissance and Biblical letters. The Gothic arch of the letter A has also helped make the font a popular choice for New Age or occult books. Mason was designed as a set of serif and sans serif variations but it’s Mason Serif Regular which is used the most. (The cover for The Science of His Dark Materials shown here is using both the sans serif variation and Mason Regular Alternate.)

Distinctive fonts take a while to get around and I don’t recall seeing Mason until at least 1994. From 1995 to 2000 it began to appear everywhere, even in newspaper ads for a while, before finding a permanent place in the book world. The trouble with this kind of ubiquity is that the novelty the design once possessed quickly vanishes and it begins to runs the risk of becoming a design cliché. Many typefaces go this way, especially in the publishing world where the choice of typeface is often dictated by genre expectations. So Orbit-B and its variants used to signify “science fiction” or “the future” in the 1970s, Caslon Antique and Rubens have become associated with horror while FF Confidential has been over-used for crime novels.

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Chiaroscuro II: Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734–1797

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An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

As promised, one of my favourite chiaroscurists. The impression Joseph Wright’s work made on me at the age of 13 was one of many revelations from my first visit to the Tate Gallery. The paintings which struck me most of the older works there were all of the Romantic or late-Romantic era: Turner, Francis Danby, John Martin, Philippe de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright’s enormous An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which is now housed in the National Gallery. The National Gallery site has this to say about the picture:

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the formation of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright’s day. The artist’s subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.

As with many paintings, the online reproductions do little justice to the subtlety of Wright’s rendering of light and shade. This remains his most famous picture although he made another on a similar theme, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (below) and, like Godfried Schalcken, he has at least two studies of people viewing statues by candlelight, a common practice at that time for the way the light gave classical sculpture a spurious life. Wright’s painting of The Alchymist is another popular work, turning up frequently in occult encyclopedias. Being a native of Derby he also became (along with de Loutherbourg) one of the first painters to depict the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution whose flaring furnaces provided an ideal subject for dramatists of flame and shadow.

Before leaving the tenebral world, I’ll note that Claire left a message to say that issue 24 of Cabinet Magazine has a feature on shadows in art, symbolism and philosophy.

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Forty years of freedom after centuries of injustice

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left: Maggi Hambling’s Oscar Wilde monument near Covent Garden, London.

“Yes, we shall win in the end; but the road will be long and red with monstrous martyrdoms.” Oscar Wilde, after his release from Reading Gaol in 1897.

“Forty years ago in Britain, loving the wrong person could make you a criminal. Smiling in the park could lead to arrest and being in the wrong address book could cost you a prison sentence. Homosexuality was illegal and hundreds of thousands of men feared being picked up by zealous police wanting easy convictions, often for doing nothing more than looking a bit gay.

“At 5.50am on 5 July 1967, a bill to legalise homosexuality limped through its final stages in the House of Commons. It was a battered old thing and, in many respects, shabby. It didn’t come close to equalising the legal status of heterosexuals and homosexuals (that would take another 38 years). It didn’t stop the arrests: between 1967 and 2003, 30,000 gay and bisexual men were convicted for behaviour that would not have been a crime had their partner been a woman. But it did transform the lives of men like Antony Grey, who had fought so hard for it, meaning that he and his lifelong partner no longer felt that every moment of every day they were at risk.”

From “Coming out of the dark ages” by Geraldine Bedell, The Observer.

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967, passed forty years ago today, was a compromised victory, as the quote above notes. The age of consent was set higher for gay men at 21 (these laws and restrictions applied to men only?lesbian sex had never been forbidden), you couldn’t be a member of the armed forces, you had to conduct your business with one other person only and in private (ie: at home; no hotel liaisons). The new act also only applied to England and Wales; Scotland had to wait until 1980 while in Northern Ireland (often a backwater where gay rights are concerned) the law wasn’t changed until 1982.

Yet it was a start, and it’s surprising and heartening to see how far things have travelled since 1967, especially when we seemed to be moving in reverse with the iniquities of the Thatcher years. Tony Blair’s government can be accused of many sins but it was never homophobic, and gave us an equalised age of consent, civil unions and finally scrapped Thatcher’s Section 28 law forbidding “the promotion of homosexuality”. Yes, gay-bashing still occurs, gay teens are bullied at school and we still have people like this idiot spouting nonsensical drivel. But Britain finally feels like a civilised place these days, more than it ever did.

It took over a century Oscar, and the road was long and red, but we made it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Joe Orton
• The Poet and the Pope
• Queer Noises