3 months agoBookmania, it’s called.
Bookman had nothing left but its verve, and this iteration of Bookman saps it of even that. Jukebox did a bitchin’ job a few years back with Bookman JF: it’s all Letraset sleaze, press-on fingernails and linen blouses and no bra. It’s a paperback soaked in sweat, it’s a 16mm film with flute over the opening titles. It’s balls-out Bookman, soft and swinging.
The terminals of JF’s ascenders are big flags of flesh, a pudding version of a Caslon wedge. The bracketing is sex at its stupidest, girls spied-on through summer-camp slats. The swashes are cummy hippie Victoriana: flowery, specifically those flowers that smell like period. Marigolds, I believe they’re called.
What JF (and its predecessors) lack is rhythm—there’s a strong cadence across their hilarious serifs, but the geometries of the letters themselves come in spurts. Lowercase e and o are shrimpy and lank, looking a little tippy-toe next to sturdy a and u. Squarer letters are utterly muscular, though muscular in the manner of beery old wrestler or a water balloon. It’s all a bit cacophonous, the sound of many different butts being slapped.
Bookmania suffers from no such dissonance: Simonson has found a single refrigerator-shaped woman and spanked her 3,177 times. Blockish, stolid, a turnip, a Canadian impersonation of Bookman’s American cheese. No lust, not even a like. A banker’s handshake. A thing made of tin.
And it’s a shame. It feels technically proficient, its weights are cleanly distributed, it gestures toward an interesting italic, it has some magazine-ready lining figures. But to what end? What’s the point of this neutered Bookman, with its wee brackets, with its newsreader bearings?
