“Faces of type are like men’s faces. They have their own expression; their complexion and peculiar twists and turns of line identify them immediately to friends, to whom each is full of identity.”

— J.L. Frazier

“A love of letters is the beginning of typographical wisdom. That is, the love of letters as literature and the love of letters as physical entities, having abstract beauty of their own, apart from the ideas they may express or the emotions they may evoke.”

– Designing with Type, James Craig

So I’m working on this big new post (check back soon) and I notice two curly quotes that for some reason struck me like they looked like that old-time barbershop down-the-middle hairstyle from the turn of the 20th century. I had typed the characters in the order they appeared on the keyboard (I had been typing just the keys with symbols) I happened to be looking at Souvenir, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1903. So then I thought, “What are the chances that Benton has this exact hairdo?” Pretty high it turns out. The keystrokes looked like the beginning of a typographic portrait.

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