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![]() Buy a Jack Reacher novel, read it, give it away to a charity shop and buy another. In most cases a book is nothing but a book. ![]() They are objects in themselves, and that’s what this blog piece is about: the Book as Object. Books aren’t simply neutral, passive vehicles for the words that they contain. However, Kindles and computers don’t provide one important element of the book – its physical presence. Similarly, our need to accumulate weighty reference books has enormously reduced since so much research material has become available online. They are lightweight and highly portable, and they don’t rustle when someone is trying to get to sleep, but they are also slightly inflexible and annoying: okay for page-turner novels, but difficult to manage for long books with multiple characters or illustrations or maps. We find Kindles useful to help prevent further book congestion. For this reason, we buy many fewer books nowadays than previously, because at least half of our current reading matter doesn’t have a physical substance but arrives through the miracle of wifi into our Kindle e-readers. Mostly, we buy books for their contents, for reading or for reference. Frances has been almost as avid a bookbuyer as me, and in addition most of her late father’s fine collection of Scottish books is also on our shelves. In the room where I write this blog, there are around 10 metres of shelving for ceramics, but nearly 43 metres of bookshelving, with a further 3 metres of books lying unshelved in piles on the floor. In my house, I have several sculptures, a few dozen rugs, scores of pictures, hundreds of pots, but thousands of books. But if you ask me what type of object I have collected most persistently and prolifically over my lifetime, then books take the number one spot. The Georgia typeface is similar to Times New Roman, another revival of transitional serif designs, but with many subtle differences: Georgia is larger than Times at the same point size, and has a much larger x-height at the same actual size.I haven’t written often in this blog about books. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series.” Carter noted that, “Verdana and Georgia… were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white… The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. Georgia’s bold is also unusually bold, almost black. Its figure (numeral) designs are lower-case or text figures, designed to blend into continuous text this was at the time a rare feature in computer fonts. Georgia typefaces are popular and often used, particularly for printing body text and books.Īs a transitional serif design, Georgia shows a number of traditional features of ‘rational’ serif typefaces from around the early 19th century, such as alternating thick and thin strokes, ball terminals, a vertical axis and an italic taking inspiration from calligraphy. ![]() The x-height (height of lower-case letters) is low, especially at larger sizes, making the capitals large relative to the lower case, while the top serifs on the ascenders of letters like ‘d’ have a downward slope and rise subtly above the cap height. Some distinctive characteristics in georgia’s letters are the small eye of the ‘e’ and the bowl of the a, which has a sharp hook upwards at top left. ![]() A b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
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