Fascinating piece of typography is an ad for gold coins (imho, not an
especially reputable company!) in the Sept. 12 issue of The Nation. (yes,
trailing period), Page 35. Immediately, you notice that all [$] (Dollar,
etc. sign) symbols are blank. Careful perusal also shows missing [%] and
[&] symbols. (The thought of expecting Qalamites to read this ad is a grim
one, btw, so I'll describe where the latter two are missing: )
Left col., middle ΒΆ, middle of the text, look for "S P" -- missing [&]
Right col., 4th body text line from top, same.
Same col., third line from bottom -- [%] omitted
Right col., gray tint, 2nd bulleted item -- [%] missing.
I didn't read too carefully, so there might be others. I did look for
other blank spaces, but didn't find any.
OK, typographical oddity, but on P. 47 ("cover 3", iirc) there's a missing
ampersand; again, not an ad I'd recommend to Qalamites. It's lower right
body texet, 5th line from the end. Typeset by the same company, perchance?
Again, apologies for the character of the ads...
===
OK, back to more-respectable matters -- one of my prized pieces of
typographical goofups is a calendar for 1997, theme Earth Day, nice
photos, nice design.
Publisher and editor was Earth Day Everyday Network, which has probably
disappeared; their phone was disconnected long ago. Brick House Pub. Co.
is called the "project manager". (No comment.)
Here's how December's days were typeset, ignoring rules: (Sorry, but
changing to a monospaced font in mid-message is not likely to work. I'm
using Verdana 14 Bold.) Sunday is leftmost. [ ] denotes a blank position.
Christmas happened on Thursday; that's correct. All Sunday dates are
correct; most other dates are, as well. Challenge: Try to find all errors
in five seconds. (You might succeed!)
[] 1 2 3 5 6 7
7 8 10 11 12 13 14
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31
It's interesting to speculate on why this went into print. (A typesetter
who had a grudge, perhaps legitimate?) It's also interesting to consider
that day-numeral errors in calendars are, afaik, quite rare, and we are
less skeptical (OK, I was) than when reading ordinary text. I've forgotten
on what day of that month I first noticed that something was wrong, but it
was embarrassingly late, maybe 14 Dec.
In the same calendar, July 31 was blank.
--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Pretty evening sky show: Go see!
<
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/26aug_sunset.htm>