"Font geek" is my wife's preferred locution, but "type geek" is the more accurate term — for reasons that are of interest only to type geeks....

Even as I write this, TypeCon2007 is underway here in Seattle. I probably wouldn't even know about it, except that my brother and a friend of mine are two of the biggest type geeks in the country, and they are, respectively, a board member and a local co-sponsor for the convention.

Being in close contact with type geeks whose geekiness so surpasses mine, I tend to forget that I, too, am a type geek. I think it's perfectly ordinary to notice bad kerning or questionable typestyle choices. I may know several typestyles by name, but at least I can't also tell you the name of the designer and the year it was produced, like some people I know.

But sometimes something reminds me. This video, for example, ostensibly a promotion for presidential candidate Ron Paul (but possibly an absurdist work of art realized in the genre of political commercial) is peculiar in so very many ways ... yet the one that I can't get over is the highly idiosyncratic use of quotation marks. At both ends of the quote, one is up and one is down. I've never seen anything like it. (Not quite safe for work.)

Was this practice standard at any time? Is it part of the antique era the film is trying to capture? I can't imagine it was done inadvertently — like when an apostrophe that comes at the beginning of a word gets flipped as if it were an single open quote, one of my own pet peeves. (More on this below.) But if the filmmaker did it on purpose, why?

My brother would probably know. I vaguely recall that a few years ago he was a participant in a gargantuan debate on some type-geek blog about when quotation marks should be top-heavy and when they should be bottom-heavy, and why. But one of each? That's just bizarre.

Kind of cool looking, though. Maybe it's as simple as that.

Afterthought: I just realized that when paired up like that the quote marks bear a slight resemblance to "69". Could that be it? Extremely subtle reference, if so.

I wrote that on Tuesday. On Wednesday I ventured to TypeCon myself to join the assembled geeks for a special anniversary screening of the film Helvetica. Not coincidentally, August 1 is Swiss National Day (anniversary of the state's confederation) and August 1, 2007, is the 50th anniversary of the release of the typeface Helvetica. Seats were open to the public, but since it was sold out weeks before, the tickets went mostly to the type geeks who were aware of it through the conference. In an audience of about 700, I'd guess that about 600 were bigger type geeks than me, which is itself pretty awesome.

The film was delightful, and I highly recommend it. Though the horde of type geeks had especial interest, it's intended for a general audience. You don't have to be a type geek to enjoy it, but you probably do have to be a fan of documentaries, which I am. (In the Q&A afterward, director Gary Hustwit called it a good date film; I'm not sure if he was serious.)

The film didn't make me any more interested in type, but it did make me want to go out and see more documentaries, such as A Player to Be Named Later or In the Shadow of the Stars. The former, which I've never seen, is about minor league baseball. It gets mentioned on Athletics Nation because one of the featured players (Marco Scutaro) later became a regular on the Oakland team. The latter I saw when it was new, some time in the early 1990s. It explores the lives of professional singers in the chorus at San Francisco Opera. At the time I knew exactly one person in the film, and he appeared only briefly in the background. Later I met about half the featured interviewees, and got to know a few of them reasonably well. I've seen it again since then, but still not in about eight years. I think that somewhere in my boxes is a VHS copy that I taped from a PBS broadcast.

I didn't do much mingling at my brief TypeCon visit, but I did chat briefly with a guy who also remembers the old Compugraphic typesetting machines I worked on in my youth. He was amazed that I was using them as late as 1997, when in most places they were obsolete by the end of the 1980s.

My last regular day job in California was for Underwriters' Report, a now-defunct weekly trade magazine for the insurance industry. UR was technologically reactionary. It was also a rare case of small business that was vertically integrated: it did nothing but the magazine, and it did every aspect of it, from advertising sales to in-house printing. The printing presses in the shop in the back were from the 1950s. The collating "machine" was a big round motorized table that could be set to spin like a self-propelled lazy-susan. The folds were stacked in order on the table, and once a week seven or eight Filipino teenagers were paid minimum wage to come in for a few hours to collate.

All but one of the guys in the back were Filipino. I never got the exact geography, but I know the two press operators were from different parts of the country. Their native tongue was not the same, though they conversed easily enough in Tagalog, which was a second language to both of them (with English an imperfect third). Their two assistants, who were close friends with each other, were from a third area but spoke the same language as one of the press guys. The collaters were from the same community as the assistants, who recruited them. The number of collaters varied from week to week depending on who felt like showing up. The two regular assistants were responsible for wrangling them by virtue of the fact that they were the ones who would have to stay late to finish if short-handed. They also knew how big the book was from week to week, so they knew when to be sure to have extras. The one non-Filipino in the back was the camera guy, who was Vietnamese.

We called him the "camera guy". I think the proper title is "lithographer", though of course his job is obsolete now, too. Probably it was obsolete even then. The camera was mounted in the wall so that it was operated from a dark room but aimed to take a picture through the wall. On the other side of the wall was an apparatus supporting what looks like a very large, hinged picture frame. The way it worked was that you'd open up the frame and put your original inside, properly aligned. A vacuum would seal it tight, and then the whole frame could be tilted up vertical. The frame was set on a track along which it could be moved to set the enlargement percentage. Back inside the dark room you mount the film, which would have to be developed in chemical baths, and that's how they made the negatives for the 1950s printing presses. In the early 1980s I worked at a small print shop that had a similar camera, and I actually operated it a few times.

Rereading my peeve about flipped apostrophes, I'm reminded of the Compugraphic machines because errant apostrophe flipping is a function of technology. The error we see all the time today is that apostrophes at the beginning of a word get flipped. For example, fish ’n’ chips comes out as fish ‘n’ chips, or the ’80s comes out as the ‘80s.

The cause of this is software set to automatically create "smart quotes". Regular typewriters typically had just one quotation marks character. This character was ambiguously straight so that it could be used at either end of a quote. Similarly, there was a single straight apostrophe, which could double as a single quotation mark on either end. These ambiguously straight marks ("dumb quotes") have made a comeback on the Web, where they appear in most blogs and forums (including in this one, everywhere except where I've deliberately made an example the smart kind).

More sophisticated typography prefers a character that curves one way to open a quote, and one that curves the other way to close it ("smart quotes"). With desktop publishing came access to these characters. However, the software assumes that the user can't be bothered to pick the correct character and wants to type exactly as he would if he were using a typewriter, and so an option is provided for automatic smart quotes. When this option is on, as it is by default, any quote mark at the beginning of a word is converted by the software to an open quote, and any other is made a close quote. The same thing is done to single quotes. Unfortunately, most single quotes are really apostrophes, which should always look like close quotes, and some apostrophes come at the beginning of a word. The software isn't clever enough to know this, and that's why apostrophes at the beginning of a word get flipped, driving type geeks and copy editors crazy.

In the days before desktop publishing, most type for print was created on typesetting machines like the Compugraphic ones I used to use. Those machines had smart quotes, too, but the typist was expected to adapt his typing habits to use them properly. The single close quote, also used as apostrophe, was to the right of the colon, where the apostrophe is on a normal keyboard now. The shift for this key was not the double quote, as it is on a normal keyboard, but a single open quote. (There was no key for a double quote. To get a double quote you'd just type the single quote twice and it would space properly.)

Unfortunately, the caps-lock on those machines wasn't smart enough to restrict itself only to letters, as caps-locks usually do nowadays. So if you had caps-lock on — or rather shift-lock, which is what they called it when it applied to every key — typing the apostrophe key would give you a single open quote instead of a single close quote. Thus if you were typing in all-caps with the shift-lock on, you'd have to remember to turn it off for any apostrophe. But many unskilled typists would forget, and thus all through the 1980s you'd see mistakes like IT‘S and ISN‘T in all-caps headlines and billboard text. And yes, that peeved me, too.

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