I've long admired the Gill Sans family of fonts. I purchased the "Gill Sans 1" and "Gill Sans 2" packages from Adobe when they were introduced quite a while back (how "quite a while?" Well, I purchased them on floppies, children). Just one problem, but that a huge one: the kerning was inexplicably atrocious—in any document, any application, I'd have to examine the text line-by-line, manually tweaking at least three or four ugly instances per paragraph. It ceased being one of my go-to sans serif choices a long time ago.

The other day I received an offer from fonts-dot-com for Monotype's "Gill Sans Nova," a reworking: forty-three fonts (eight or nine of them outlandish display variants I'm unlikely ever to use) for US $99. I bit. My first test drives please me greatly: the letterforms are virtually identical to the corresponding Adobe fonts, the range of weights and styles greatly expanded, and the kerning now unobjectionable. Going forward, I'll be able to give my trusted retainers in the loyal Frutiger family some occasional time off.

To celebrate this happy acquisition I will now cue up "The Last Time I Saw Paris" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

That's a joke, by the way.

chordially (heh-heh),

Although I was not aware of it when I first purchased Adobe's Gill Sans, the font's creator, Eric Gill, appears to have been a man of both prodigious talents and insatiable erotic appetites. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it appears that he would fuck anything with a hole in it, including his sisters, his daughters and his dog. The release of Gill Sans Nova has moved the editor of "Digital Arts" to reprise a piece he published four years ago to remind all and sundry that even if the rest of us lack any trace of human decency in these matters, he himself is way too high-minded to use Gill's fonts, although he graciously grants his permission for others to do so, provided we can live with ourselves.

Me, I don't give a shit. The man's been dead for seventy-five years next week, and his sisters are pining for the fjords; likewise his daughters (the last of these died at the age of 92 in 1999). It's a safe bet that the dog isn't around any more either. I'm going to deploy my new typefaces with an unclouded conscience.

cordially,

Well, community standards are a moving target, but some of his sculpture, for example, likely wouldn't go over well at the average Rotary Club dinner, and it's probable that his erotic engravings number in the hundreds. Here's the artist recalling his discovery as a lad that the standard equipment had an undocumented feature: "What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water tap into a pillar of fire?"

cordially,