by Firmin Didot
Editor/Designer Kaori Murata December 2010 Typography I
Introduction
Didot is a typeface named after the famous French printing and type producing family. It is classified as modern or ‘Didone.’ The typeface was based on a collection developed in the period between 1784 and 1811. Firmin Didot is the designer of the typeface while his brother, Pierre Didot was the printer. Didot’s characteristic lies in the extreme contrast between the thick strokes and thin strokes, the hairline serifs and verticial stress of the letters.
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Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stirup an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land wand the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.
This is a valley of ashes—a
“I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimeys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort,of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their
irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, broodw on over the solemn dumping ground.
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and Iwas alone again in the unquiet darkness.
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft
twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets ... I saw him too, looking up and wondering.
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He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold andwide open to the warm windy afternoon and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
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He smiled understandingly-much more than un-
derstandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at thatpoint it vanished-and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech justmissed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
“You can’t repeat the past.” “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home
across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he
seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face
came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
One autumn night, five years before, they had been
walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars.
Through all he said, even through his appalling
sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb mwwan’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
“I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life.�
“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.�
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Didot Typeface Designed By: Firmin Didot Laser Printed December 2010 Edition of Two