Except that the colophons go into much more detail. For a real comparison, imagine that, instead of just saying “technicolor”, there was a blurb at the end that talked about what generation of Technicolor was used, and how they adjusted the color balance, and what stock it was all printed on.
Tom Weller, in one of his books (either Science Made Stupid or Culture Made Stupid) has a wonderful parody of the typical colophon, going on about “full-bodied serifs” and the like, and ending up with “the ink came out of a can.”
I notice that my copy of The Days of H. L. Mencken has a colophon. It was printed in Scotch Modern . It was published in 1947 by Alfred A. Knopf and reprinted by Dorset Press in 1989.
The colophon has the observation that the modernity is in the sense of 1800 and not of today.
So Papyrus is right out then?
Hmm, how about Shatter?
O’Reilly is famous for putting engravings of animals on its programming books. The colophon in each book explains a bit about the particular animal.
Interesting thread! I always read colophons.
Heh. The phrase “type foundry” always makes me think of big sweaty guys with thick glasses laboring over anvils with letters, hammers and tongs, as sparks fly everywhere.
It’s an era that has long since come and gone. The “Idiot’s Guide to Publishing” remarks: Don’t bother to compare your work to Hemingway, Dickens or Shakespeare, the 20-somethings who read submissions won’t have read them.
Didn’t get any attention earlier, so let me give another shout out to musician or font?
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Didn’t get any attention earlier, so let me give another shout out to musician or font?
[/QUOTE]
I like your list. Also fitting would be Friz Quadrata and Cooper Black.
I wonder if the colophon was a way to help fill up the blank pages at the end of the signature.
I don’t read that little blurb in books, because I couldn’t care less about their font choice. It’s meaningless to me. I find it bizarre so many people are interested in it. 
That’s a pretty spiffy typeface. I’ll have to remember to take a look at the book if I get the chance to see how it looks on the page.
That’s a pretty spiffy typeface. I’ll have to remember to take a look at the book if I get the chance to see how it looks on the page.
As someone who likes fonts, it does interest me, and even otherwise I would find it interesting in the same way as people like DVD commentaries.
But yeah, it does seem sort of like a random inclusion of information on the production of the book, compared with the totality of information about it’s making. Especially in the absence of other information.
Good point. You don’t often see “about the paper used in this book,” or “about the cover artist,” or “about the printing press used for this book.” Sometimes, but not often.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:54, topic:571484”]
Good point. You don’t often see “about the paper used in this book,” or “about the cover artist,” or “about the printing press used for this book.” Sometimes, but not often.
[/QUOTE]
I’d like to see a colophon start out with “About the Writing”:
*The initial idea was scribbled on the back of a receipt at a sidewalk
café in Montreal, using a Zebra mechanical pencil with a .5 mm lead.
This was transferred to a 4 x 6" wire-bound pocket notebook the next morning
using a Bic ballpoint pen, with typos and poor grammar intact.
The subsequent draft was fleshed out with Sharpie and a college notebook
(graph paper, 4 sq/inch) at McSorley’s Ale House over a cheap but serviceable microwbrew.
. . .*
~ ~ ~
And, for the poster who said he didn’t care about fonts: I’m setting a copy of Tolstoy in Comic Sans for ya.
To be fair and honest, I read enough comics I wouldn’t care. 
I believe one or two books by Douglas Adams has something about how the book was written on an Apple IIe using a copy of WordPerfect or something else along those lines. I’m thinking one of the Dirk Gently books.
In the supplemental material in the trade paperback version of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver is the following, labelled “From Pen to Printed Page”:
Doesn’t say anything about the typeface, though.
That’s the real problem with Comic Sans. It’s not even a good Comics font. Even webcomics tend to prefer hand lettering or a font that looks like it. (or they don’t care about it at all, and stick with Arial or Times New Roman).
On another note, I would love to have a collophone for this website. I have no idea why they chose such ugly fonts and hard to read fonts (except the monospace one which is pretty good.) Yeah, they’re free fonts, but why force them on people who have better ones?
Gary’s first rule of typography: Just because you can use 17 different fonts on one page–complete with italics, boldface, underlining, small caps, and all caps–doesn’t mean you should.