Simon Garfield > Quotes

“These days, digitization enables us to view the copies [of the Gutenberg Bible] online without the need for a trip to the Euston Road, although to do so would be to deny oneself one of the great pleasures in life. The first book ever printed in Europe - heavy, luxurious, pungent and creaky - does not read particularly well on an iPhone.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“Of course you can judge a book by its cover; moreover, we are obliged to.”
― Simon Garfield

“One thing was for sure: no one wanted a repeat of Christopher Barker’s Bible of 1631, which omitted the negative from the seventh commandment so that it read, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences' he wrote. 'No one can say that the O's roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or a girl's breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things”
― Simon Garfield

“In 1979 the New York Times reported that in many {New York Subway} stations, the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all - a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“Ecofont is designed to save ink, money and eventually the planet, but heaven save us from worthy fonts. Ecofont is a program that adds holes to a font. The software takes Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman and prints them is if they had been attacked by moths. They retain their original shape but not their original form, and so lose their true weight and beauty... a study at the University of Wisconsin claimed that Ecofonts, such as Ecofont Vera Sans, actually uses more ink and toner than lighter fonts such as Century Gothic...”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography published by CUP in 1907 was printed in Caslon”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“Type has rhythm, just like music.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“...the book typographer's job was building a window between the reader inside a room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a stained glass window of marvelous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be look at, not through.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“And that’s the challenge for all of us – to create warmth in a digital world.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“The truly perfect pangram would contain all the letters of the alphabet in the right order, but the only thing that achieves that is the alphabet. There are phrases that use fewer characters, but they are not as catchy. And this is not for want of trying. Here are two of the shortest: 'Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.' 'Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“Yet despite its current usage, the @ is not a product of the digital age, and may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as an *amphora* or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is *shtrudl*, meaning strudel, in Czech it is *zavinac* or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (*Affenschwanz* or monkey's tail in German, *snabel-a* meaning "the letter a, with a trunk," in Danish, *sobaka* or dog in Russian,), or both (*escargot* in French).”
― Simon Garfield

“Everybody wants to design a bloody typeface.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“industry without art is brutality”.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“You clock in to the clock. You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock. You eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock . . . You do that for forty years of your life, you retire, what do they fucking give you? A clock!”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“Most people take the way words look for granted ... Words are there to be read – end of story. Once however typomania sets in, it becomes quite a different story.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“But now with young kids – there are so many more nerds.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“The lettering is clean, beautifully proportioned, easily read, and, well, ordered.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“I, for one, do not wish to live in a world where everything is planned: I would much rather have liberty to make a fool of myself than become an ideal citizen by regulation. - George Taylor”
― Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives

“O cambiarte el nombre por Neville Brody. Si fueras él, habrías entrado a trabajar en la revista londinense The Face en 1981 y habrías transformado su diseño, asaz predecible, de manera tal que tu estilo reverberaría no solo en otras revistas sino en libros, discos y otros muchos aspectos del diseño comercial de las siguientes décadas.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“¿Todavía no hemos acabado? ¿Por qué necesitamos todas estas fuentes nuevas? La respuesta, entonces y ahora, es la misma: porque el mundo y lo que contiene están en perpetuo cambio. Necesitamos poder expresarnos de nuevas maneras.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“The mid-century Conservative Party in England had arrived at a universal font truth: we tend to treat the traditional and familiar as trustworthy. We are dubious of fonts that alert us to their difference, or fonts that seem to be trying too hard. We don't like being consciously sold things, or paying for fancy design we don't need.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“the OED also maintains a list of the old words we use most often, and they are words we might expect: the, be, to, of and, of course, and. But what are the most commonly used nouns? Month is at number 40. Life is number 9. Day is 5, and Year is 3. Person is at number 2, while the most commonly used noun in the English language is time.2 The OED observes that our lexicon relies on time not merely as a single word, but as a philosophy: more actions and phrases depend on time than any other. On time, last time, fine time, fast time, recovery time, reading time, all-time. The list goes on for ages. It leaves us in no doubt of time’s unassailable presence in our lives. And reading just the beginning of that list might lead one to imagine we have come too far, and are travelling too fast, to reinvent time or stop it altogether. But as we shall see in the next chapter, we once had a notion that such things were both possible and desirable.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“I’ve come across studies that show a fascinating tendency of white-collar workers to inflate their work hours.’ This applied particularly to those employed in what she calls ‘white-collar sweatshops’, the traditionally punishing arenas of finance and tech.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“Conserving national resources was a sensible wish; it became a prescient necessity when the US entered the war six years later. But the desire to make the country great again may have appeared a tired political slogan even then. The belief of a better past is clearly a compelling one, but whether the past was better in the days of Taylor and Roosevelt in 1911 or in the mind of Donald Trump in 2016 is difficult to say.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“And that's the challenge for all of us - to create warmth in a digital world. Not many people can do it. You see a lot of stuff that looks great but simply doesn't turn you on. It's like making a song on a synthesizer. To make a drum machine sound good is really difficult - you might as well play real drums. We're still analogue beings. Our brains and eyes are analogue.”
― Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

“(It was the best of Times New Roman, it was the worst of Times New Roman.)”
― Simon Garfield, In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World

“Las preguntas más importantes que debemos hacernos a la hora de elegir y valorar un tipo son: ¿se ajusta a la función que se le ha asignado? ¿Transmite el mensaje? Y ¿añade belleza a este mundo?”
― Simon Garfield

“And thus the museum took on a new role, and became a symbol and demonstration of time: time passing, time tracked, time catalogued. In some form at least, a museum is merely a chronology of its specialism, a consistent desire to order and explain events beyond randomness.”
― Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

“Vooralsnog hebben e-mails niet hetzelfde effect in een verhaal, omdat e-mails niet worden aangetroffen op zolder of onder een losse plank onder de vloer, of in dozen als mensen doodgaan.”
― Simon Garfield