On Typesets and Dan Rather
Posted by Moonage on 11 Sep 2004 | Tagged as: 2004 Presidential Election
| P 1 | P 2 | P 3 | P 4 | P 5 | Pt 6 |
I am shamelessly stealing yet another post from The Motley Fool. This one’s by one of my favorite posters, MichaelRead, a charter member of The Motley Fool where this post originally appeared. ( He told me to say that, so I am. ) He asked me to describe him as such:
MichaelRead is geezer living in White Rock, British Columbia, where he spends his time walking the beach looking at young nubile women while vainly trying to suck his gut in and failing miserably. The woman beside him falling to the ground laughing uncontrollably is his wife Elly who, now in their so far 20-year marriage, believes MichaelRead’s gut-sucking abilities were lost more than a decade ago. MichaelRead vehemently denies this and says he has a body of a 30 year-old to which Elly says, Give it back. You’re wrinkling it all up.
And now, something completely different, the post:
I have an Olivetti manual I bought in 1971 that has fraction and degree/th keys. However, as all manuals and as in Rather’s examples, these were -as all manuals - mono-spaced. However, the th produced by manuals was an underlined th and not a MS Word th that doesn’t have an underline. Small point? I owned an ad agency in the early 1970s and I had a slew of typewriters ranging from manuals to high-end Selectrics and no way could I have produced a document as are the questionable memos.
About Times Roman. It was cut for the Times newspaper in England in the early 1930s. I could go on about why but I won’t (it has a lot to do with eight-column page formats and lots of nerdy typesetting stuff and I am a typesetting nerd and would fill this post with lots of stuff). However, it was a typeface owned by The Times (as The Economist owns its new typeface cut a few years ago for the newspaper) and licensed to a company called Monotype who created brass casting matrixes for Linotype and Intertype typesetters.
Follow me so far? It was patented (yes, you can patent typefaces), licensed and if you wanted it for your newspaper you paid a royalty. That’s why, when IBM came up with the ball-type typewriter it didn’t use Times Roman or Times New Roman (the difference between the two is a long discussion and it involves patent busting and only interesting to nerd as I) but chose a 19th Century cut Bookman as its serif face. Bookman looks somewhat like Times New Roman but if you look you’ll see many differences (once again nerdy stuff as bowl shape, ascender and decender length, serif weight and angle and more).
Now, if the memos were typed on a high-end IBM model such as a Compositor (I wanted one of those but the price was many times that of even a good Selectric model) the serif face would be Bookman.
The questionable memos are in proportionally spaced and kerned Monotype Times New Roman. No way could I have done that even with the best typesetting equipment in the early 1970s. Sure, phototypesetting was coming into being about then and one thing phototypesetting offered was proportion and kerning yet the machines were tad expensive and only professional typesetting companies had them.
Oh, one last thingy. In the late 1960s I was an assistant editor for Canadian Printer and Publisher at McLean-Hunter in Toronto and wrote a few (ha!) articles on typesetting and typeface design.
As I said, a nerd. And, as a nerd commenting, those memos are as fake as a $3 bill.
MichaelR
——————————————————-
Dan Rather still contends the documents are valid enough to support his opinion piece on 60 Minutes. He has another problem tho………
No Comments »
