In Search of the Characters of New York

Randy Kennedy in the New York Times:

Type2184If you are not the sort of person who cares deeply about the Old World subtleties of Fournier, the retro-hipster swirl of Ministry Script or the plain-vanilla, rock-ribbed dependability of Helvetica – nor the sort immediately able to identify the typeface you are reading right now as 8.7-point Imperial – then you were probably not aware that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared this week Type Week in New York City.

You also might have assumed that a group of a dozen people wandering around the Upper East Side on Thursday morning, snapping pictures of the unremarkable words “Public School 6” inscribed into stone above an unremarkable red door on East 81st Street were tourists in possession of a badly translated guidebook…

These pilgrims were among about 500 people, some from as far away as Brazil and Finland, who have converged on the city for TypeCon, a yearly gathering of typographers, printers, designers, calligraphers and assorted, self-described font freaks and type nerds who can argue about kerning into the wee hours.

More here.