Not necessarily my type

About softball, serifs, and strange government edicts

As a proud alumnus of the Bodoni Romans, my college’s intramural softball team, I hesitate to criticize the use of serif typefaces (of which Bodoni Roman is an ideal example). But the Trump administration’s recent decree that all official government documents employ only serif fonts—which are more difficult to read than sans serif alternatives, particularly for people with dyslexia and other visual disabilities—is just too weird.

The action hardly is anywhere near as low as freezing child care funding or unleashing gun-toting ICE agents against an unarmed Minnesota woman. Still, by rejecting cleaner, easier to digest sans serif type, the White House appears to be imposing another curb on full public accessibility. Let the Great Unwashed strain their eyes on serifs, those little “feet” at the bottom of letters.

All U.S. diplomatic posts have been ordered to employ only serif type, supposedly to “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” But could it be, as Timothy Noah of the New Republic argues, that the administration’s rejection of sans serif lettering is “because they think it’s DEI bullshit”?

Serifs date back to use in ancient stonework and later were thought to add weight and clarity to written and printed texts. Long ago, the marketing business instead embraced sans serif fonts, in part because they were easier to decipher from a distance and thus provided more of a universal outreach for eyeballs. With the coming of the World Wide Web, sans serif likewise was judged to provide a better display for Everyman.

In 2023, the Biden administration joined that move toward modernization by switching State Department communications away from serif fonts to the sans serif Calibri typeface (which is being used in this dispatch). It since has been demonstrated repeatedly, or course, that Trump is bent on negating anything Biden implemented.

Serif fonts remain dominant in books, magazines and most newspapers. (Remember newspapers?) And I, as a lifelong fan of newspapers and a half-century working for a print daily, naturally have a close relationship with serif printing. In my Journalism School days at the University of Missouri, we used serifs—specifically, bold Bodoni Roman headlines—in the Columbia Missourian. That’s what led to christening our J-School softball team the Bodoni Romans. (A pretty good outfit: good fielding, decent hitting, a nice esprit de corps.)

In those days of so-called “hot type,” composing headlines consisted of assembling slugs of metal letters by hand on a Ludlow machine. And to assure the headline would fit the space allotted, “counting” letters was required. (Most lowercase letters counted a half-unit; figures and questionmarks one unit, capital letters—except M and W, which were 2s—1 ½ units.)

In the Missourian’s unionized backshop, an employee would physically put the letters in place on the Ludlow for our suggested headlines. So when our letter counting wasn’t precise—leaving a headline too long—that employee would suggest sarcastically that we “use rubber type next time.” Ha.

Or, in my experience with one of our favorite backshop fellows, an imposing man more than six feet tall and probably 250 pounds—we called him “Tiny”—he would quietly step away and let us students futz around in search of a new, shorter word and—sometimes—use spacing that was less than optimal between words.

So the result would be something LikeThis. (A teaching moment, that.)

These days, or course, the Ludlow is long gone because everyone uses “cold type,” and a headline simply is typed on a computer screen and activated with the “enter” button. But still, for many, many papers and books, most often featuring serif fonts.

All this aside, it just seems terribly silly that our government insists on a type that is increasingly less fashionable and less user friendly. Like demanding that authorities write in Old English text, or the likes of “Chiller” or STENCIL” fonts, which look about how one would envision them. Why not Wingdings—the series of symbols implemented by Microsoft in the 1990s as packaging for word processors? When you type a letter on your keyboard, a squiggly, nonsensical Wingdings symbol—theoretically for aesthetic purposes but not helpful for communication—appears instead.

(The celebrated 18^th Century typographer Giambattista Bodoni, by the way, was not Roman—though he worked there for years. He was from Parma in Northern Italy. There is no record of him ever playing softball.)

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