Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
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 most recent book is All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia.
Simon Garfield's website
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How did you become interested in fonts?
I've been interested in fonts long before I knew any of their names or anything of their history. It began seriously for me when I bought my first album covers as a boy - I clearly remember going to a shop near my home in north-west London, buying David Bowie's Hunky Dory and Electric Warrior by T Rex, and gazing at their sleeves on the bus. That was the beginning of it. A fascination with book jackets soon followed, and then the credits on TV shows, and then computers.
Why are there so many different fonts?
I haven't counted them all, but there are an estimated 100,000 different font designs in the world, most of them available to download on your computer. Of course we don't need them all, but then again we probably don't need all the songs in the world either, or all the paintings. But we will always need to express our emotions in new and modern ways, and we are a creative race, so we need to keep on inventing.
Everyone likes to ask what your favorite font is. I'll go one further: what is your favorite letter? Why?
At the moment (and this tends to change every week), my favorite letter is the lower-case 'i' in the London Underground font. Designed by Edward Johnston almost...
Cynthia Barnett is an award-winning environmental journalist who has reported on water and climate change around the world. Her new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans, was released in July 2021 ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Timekeepers
Try:
Rain
by Cynthia Barnett
Marcus du Sautoy is Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is author of eight books and two plays. Du Sautoy is a Fellow of the Royal Society and... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Timekeepers
Try:
Around the World in Eighty Games
by Marcus du Sautoy
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