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The ABC of Fonts: Albertus, Baskerville and Comic Sans

Three small books, three different typefaces.

The first is my favourite display face, the second is my favourite text face, and the third is - the third is Comic Sans.

Together, they may be the only typefaces you will ever need. At the very least I can promise three fascinating accounts of how these unique visual languages came to be and why they’ve endured (Albertus is from the 1930s, Baskerville from the 1750s, and Comic Sans will be 30 in 2024).

Each of the three made a brief appearance in my book Just My Type in 2010, but they now have a show of their own.

The story of Albertus (or at least my telling of it) begins in the Bronx in 1973 at the birth of hip hop before taking over much of London.

The story of Baskerville examines the obsessions of the man who made it and the restless safari of his corpse.

And the tragi-comic story of Comic Sans relates how a typeface got out of control.

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Simon Garfield

Simon Garfield was born in London in 1960. He is the author of an appealingly diverse and unpredictable canon of non-fiction, including the bestsellers Mauve, Just My Type and On The Map. He is a trustee of Mass Observation, and is the editor of several books of diaries from the archive, including Our Hidden Lives and A Notable Woman. His recent books include Timekeepers, In Miniature, and All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia.

Other Books

All The Knowledge in the World

This is the story of trying to cram everything we know into a few heavy books.

On one level it’s a study of the development of encyclopaedias, those hugely ambitious and expensive publishing ventures that began about 300 years ago in Paris and Edinburgh. On another level it’s a story about trying to explain the world.

The End of Innocence

The reissue of Simon Garfield’s classic account of the first devastating years of AIDS in the UK.

How does a country control a virus that is killing increasing numbers of people?

How does a government contain an epidemic spread by sex, drug use and blood products?

And how does a population react when told that everyone is at risk from infection?

In 1986, when the British government woke up to the problem of AIDS, it estimated that 30,000 people had already been infected with HIV. Why was it so slow to act? Would the situation have been different if most of those affected had not been gay men?

With an introduction by Russell T. Davies and a new Afterword

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize

Dog's Best Friend

Why is he here?

Why is my dog lying at my feet in the shape of a croissant as I write this? How have I come to cherish his warm but lightly offensive pungency? How has his fish breath become a topic of humour when friends call round for dinner? Why do I shell out more than a thousand pounds each year to pay for his insurance? And why do I love him so much?