A Funny Bookstore Anecdote from a 1950s Science Fiction Fanzine. (Might even be true!)

A certrain New York fan and mag dealer catered to the well known fannish taste for future art (commonly known as pornography) and had a code.  You ordered "fantasy mags", "weird mags" or "stf mags" depending on whether you wanted dirty comic books, obscene photos or smutty stories.  Fans being the slans they are, he did quite well--up to the time his place was raided!  At least one Michigan fan was visited by the postal authorities, who wanted to know why they found a lot of his orders for "stf mags" etc in the dealer's store when they raided it.
--Martin Alger

The Resurrection of Maltravers. Alexander Lernet-Holenia.

An interesting book from Vienna, in which a decadent count "dies", and then comes back to life.  Rather than going back to his old life, he decides to start anew.  This is not a "bad man turns good" story: more complex, and not so rosy.  Instead, Maltravers decides to train a handsome young man in the ways of a jaded old man.

Some great scenes, a subtle sense of humor, with quite a few good one-liners of philosophy, psychology, or humor.  Here's a good one (from a rambling thought process of Maltravers), but be sure not to tell John Gray:

"All men love all women at once, and all women love only the man they love.  All women are only one woman to a man, and one man is all men to a woman."

I would recommend it, though the translation is a bit quirky at times.

A Legacy of Letters: An Assessment of Stanley Morison's Monotype 'Programme of Typographical Design'. Mark Argetsinger

This beautifully produced book by Michael & Winifred Bixler (2008) was originally written as an essay to be included in the 1999 Godine reissue of Morison's "Tally of Types", but was judged to be too long for the book.

Argetsinger does an excellent job of providing a brief historical background to Morison and his times.  Typography had been widely argued about for a half-century before Morison first started working at Cambridge University: this discussion largely begun by the great William Morris, who demanded not only that craft be an art, but that typography should go back to its scriptorial roots.

Morison began his career at a time when many books began to be photographically reproduced, via offset, rather than being printed with type.  Morison was both a conservative, in that he insisted that historical type fonts and layouts be thoroughly researched, yet also a radical because he demanded that it be efficient and utilitarian.  In his own words, he says that typography is "the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end."

One of the most thought-provoking sentences in the book is this comment by Argetsinger: "The engineers  are beholden to art to the degree that they must make it their task to prevent the servant mechanism from contaminating the master letterform."  This is especially interesting in light of today's age of electronic display of type.

Although the essay is fascinating in itself, it is further enhances by nice plates of type specimens.