For the first two weeks of April, 2011.
Windsor is everywhere, reader. You have shown me.
A special to thanks to T.S. “Mighty” Flynn and May for sending along this recent article in The Guardian about the relationship between Woody Allen’s films and Windsor Elongated. Specifically:
Windsor is a playful display face with heavy rounded serifs designed by Elisha Pechey in 1905 for the Sheffield type foundry Stephenson, Blake. Times New Roman it ain’t. It’s the kind of typeface you might have expected to have seen in adverts pasted on to the sides of buildings in London or New York a century ago.
Times New Roman it ain’t!
My co-worker Caly spotted this truck (pictured below) in Lowertown St. Paul. It belongs to J.B.’s Wood Floor Maintenance of Roseville, Minnesota. There is a certain agreeably deadpan cosmopolitan quality to driving a Toyota truck from the suburbs to re-sand wood floors in artists’ lofts. On the “deadpan cosmopolitan” 1-10 scale, that’s a solid 7. J.D. only loses points for being from Roseville (in terms of deadpan cosmopolitan St. Paul suburbs, South St. Paul or Falcon Heights would have been more ideal, although Roseville is better than, say, White Bear Lake).
Longtime reader and honorary Milwaukee correspondent Tony sends this photo and update:
While perusing a used book sale today at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, I happened upon some additional editions of The Last Whole Earth Catalog: The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog, as well as the Whole Earth Epilog. I hereby submit them for your records.
On a personal note, your tireless dedication to this typeface allowed me the opportunity (shortly after snapping this low-quality digital photograph) to smile casually at the unkempt graduate student browsing next to me while smugly thinking to myself, “I bet that guy doesn’t know what typeface this is. I do. It is Windsor.”
Let’s review the specifics again here: (1) a library named for an Israeli prime minister, (2) a shaggy, ill-kempt graduate student, (3) the city of Milwaukee, (4) a used book sale, (5) The Whole Earth Catalog, one of the most perfect printed documents ever produced by the hand of man, and (6) silent smugness. That is a perfect 10 out of 10 on the DC scale. This, my friends, is what Windsor is all about.
Well-established FoS12 Rachel also sends an excellent proposed re-design for the Tumblr logo. Can you imagine a world where the contents of your Tumblr dashboard matched the promise of Windsor?
Something I noticed on the 21A the other day: right in the window at Nina’s on Selby at Western on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul. Coffee, bakery, salads, etc., all in all-caps Windsor. I’m not a huge fan of all-caps Windsor, since the real charm of the whole thing lies in its lowercase letters. Still, it’s good to see.
Also, my dear friend Anne pointed out something so spectacular, and so wonderful, and so obvious, I never even noticed it before. But look, right there, in our city’s most famous and justly celebrated music venue — the 7th Street Entry logo at First Ave. It is a 100% 10-out-of-10 pitch-perfect 1970s-vintage use of the typeface in question. Behold!
Lastly, I would like to extend a hearty congratulations to my colleague, His Preposterousness, Raynor Ganan, Universal Philosopher of Absolute Reality. Dr. Ganan, U.P.O.A.R. was recently certified by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to perform sacred ceremonies of various kinds, and I was most delighted to see his new business card utilize that most preposterous and sacred of typefaces. As His Potency rarely, if ever, utilizes capitalization in his correspondence, Windsor and its beautiful, loping diagonal lowercases is a perfect choice.
Have you seen Windsor in the wild? Let me know. Until then, remember: Times New Roman it ain’t.
