on the road to damascus...

...I discovered the road to Palestine.

Appropriately enough, to get there one has to take the Mount Carmel Road.

Actually, I was on my way over to Bath. And, if you're a regular on this blog, you'll probably remember that I always prefer to take the scenic route. But Bath is lovely in itself - and for a typographer, surely the icing on the cake has to be the wonderfully elegant street names.

If you're not a designer or typographer (skip this part if you are), this style of lettering is called small caps - it's where all the words are set in capitals, but the initial capital is slightly larger. And here they're only just that wee bit bigger, which makes it all the more elegant (in fact, if you're not a typographer, you probably might not realise that they're larger at all). But you can see what I mean by elegant if I show you what this would look like if you let your computer do the setting.

Admittedly this is designed for reading on the printed page, not for the side of a building. But if someone (like Robert Adam perhaps) were to do this today, they'd use a computer. And, in the process, they'd lose the elegance. And that's the problem with pastiche, I suppose. (Feel free to discuss if you disagree.)

Look a bit higher, and then you find there's lettering up on the roof as well.

I'm still wondering whether that's a smith and plumber called J. Ellett, or a firm of solicitors (perhaps even the firm used by Jane Austen) called J. Ellett, Smith & Plumber. And whether the weather vane is there to tell you that they're over there, to the right.

Because I was there for a little while I took lunch (yes, it's Bath, it's elegant, and so one has to 'take' lunch rather than 'have' lunch, don't you know). And what else could I possibly choose but a designer pizza?

Ah, such a perfect day. I wish that I'd spent it with you (apologies to Lou Reed).

Comments

[ManxStef]

“Admittedly this is designed for reading on the printed page, not for the side of a building.”

Taking your example of Trajan, it’s actually *from* the side of a building originally :) It was digitised by Carol Twomby from the base of the Roman monument “Trajan’s column”. (I learned that from Spiekermann’s book “Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works” which, incidentally, I found to be excellent, despite some poor reviews on Amazon.)

Not sure what typeface was used for the Bath street names, though. The R looks like Didot, but I don’t think that’s it?

Gah, I'm hungry now and want designer pizza for lunch!