This Egyptian Bold Extra Extended A is something that comes from the 19th century and you see it on Victorian music hall posters, and it’s also a popular letter in early American wood type. If you get type designers on a project like this, the risk is that they’re all going to go for the most obscure thing they can find and they’ll try to out-something each other and be as elitist as they can, but that’s not the case here. They don’t all have long wacky obscure names. He’s picked the Egyptian Bold Extra Extended A. My favourite A is actually the first one in the book, picked by David Quay, who I don’t know at all. It begins with five As, two Cs, five Gs and so on. It’s a small format book and without any question it’s my favourite typeface book. Every month they asked a type designer or someone involved in the graphic arts to pick a letter in any font and describe why they like it. It’s a collection devoted to a love of letters. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīy published by Grafik Magazine & various contributors Read.Elders fret constantly about young people's spelling and grammar. Whether the setting is Roman Britain or Renaissance Italy, correspondents are always whining about not receiving as many letters as they send. Kathryn Hughes Cantering through two millennia of letters with Garfield as our guide, it's fun to spot the things that never change. Just like emails, letters are only as good as the people who write them. He's right, to a point, but every time we sit down to write we make up a new self to show the world - one that is cleverer, wittier, stronger, kinder or crosser than we actually are. Garfield predicates his love letter to the letter on the assumption that there is something intrinsically superior about committing your thoughts to paper rather than pinging them through the web: you think a bit harder, write a bit slower and the result is a richer thing. Err on the side of formality and you sound cross, go chummy and you sound like a stalker. And it's comforting to learn that the whole hello/goodbye thing has always got people in a tizz.

Cantering through two millennia of letters with Garfield as our guide, it's fun to spot the things that never change.

To the Letter by Simon Garfield