Trajan

Typefaces appeal to me. In an odd series of events while in high school I learned the printing trade. It was more of a pastime for me but it did provide sustenance during various times in my life. One time when I matriculated to Southern Illinois University and miscalculated my finances, I opened the school newspaper’s want ads to look for a job. 

There was a notice asking for a small offset printer operator (this was before ubiquitous copy machines) for the newspaper. I obtained an interview with the massive chain smoking master printer. I introduced myself and he led me to the shop. There on an equally massive paper cutter was a disheveled reem of paper. I instinctively picked it up, fanned the pages restoring order to it and set it carefully back on the cutter’s surface. He said your hired and walked out.

 

Many classical typefaces are based on script chiseled into various Roman Ruins. The most famous being Trajan’s column in Rome. As you can see, this type is all capitals and is often referred to as “capitalis monumentalis”. Capitals date to 43 BC. 

 

They have been lost and rediscovered countless times over the centuries. Many scholars and craft people have struggled to decipher their magic. They were chiseled into rock., carved into wood, drawn freehand, set into type and programed into software. 

 

As you can imagine, considering the millennia they have existed there are a cast of interesting characters that comes along with reading about the Capital’s history. There is also a quest to reduce Trajan’s inscription to a geometric formula, to divine its proportionality. 

 

There was Walter Kaech from Germany, a graphic designer, craftsman and scholar that wrote four books detailing the superiority of Roman letters. There was the multidimensional Catholic priest, Father Catich, who due to his Chicago sign painting past, when he was posted to Rome for four years became obsessed with the Trajan Inscription and wrote two scholarly volumes about them. And there is Carol Twombly, a graduate of The Rhode Island School of Design, who digitally replicated the Trajan Capitals. 

 

To that end rubbings, cast, reproductions, drawings, and photos have been made repeatedly. some of the rubbings are quite famous and are housed in renown research libraries. Some believe the capitals only come alive if they are chiseled, carved or hand drawn. Many used the capitals as raw material for their own font creations. I am composing this short essay in Word’s Trajan Pro (12 point) and I am delighted to have the choice to choose from hundreds of fonts at the click of a finger.

 

Maybe, if you have gotten this far, I have inspired you to look, as you would with a fine painting or sculpture, at the letters on the page. Someone, somewhere had to create everything we see, hear, taste, feel . . . relish in it.

 

  

Gathering

A post covid reunion with two friends I met when I was 4 and 5 years old got me thinking friendship. We represent multiple careers paths. One with a life time spent in tool and die as a machinist and a shop manager. The other a diesel mechanic turned firefighter and educator with a side line in hospital building engineering. And me with a list too long to catalogue but much of it spent in health care. 

At our gathering I mentioned the complete lack of sports in our childhoods. Most of our time, whether summer or winter, was spent in one garage or another. There were bicycles, minibikes, Model A’s, Triumph sports cars, motorcycles, various boats, and other mechanical projects. 

 

At some point in our late teens, we went our various ways off to school, to work, to see the world. Thankfully over sixty-five years we managed to keep in touch. It is quite a remarkable feat. When discussing certain memorable events there are now a few disputed interpretations due to, I imagine, the complications of sixty year old memories. 

 

That said most memories are etched in stone. Priests, nuns, and teachers we were exposed too stand out. Some are remembered more fondly than others. Some who in this day would be driven from the teaching profession. Overall, each of us had a firm enough foundation that the various travails thrown at us hardly mattered. 

 

We have vivid memories of each other’s families. Irish, Italian and German traditions color each recollection. I am still terrified of one friend’s beloved family dog that would have dispatched me at an early age had it been let into the room. The neighborhood, where I continue to live, was mainly German and Irish back then as were the churches and restaurants and bars.

 

It was a small Chicago neighborhood that was centered around the church and grammar school. At some point one of us moved to the suburbs. We attended different high schools, some Catholic, some not. Got exposed to a world of different people. Made other friendship, met and married spouses, had children. 

 

When I was young it was a common joke that our elders lived in the past. We tolerated their memories which were brought up whenever the conversation lagged. I get it now, even as I continue to add to my experiential bank. Are my new adventures as potent as the past ones; are they on an equal footing; I can’t say.

 

What I can say is that these and other prized relationships are invaluable. In fact, they are what make up the neuronal pathways that propel each day forward. An adage I see each morning when I walk into the kitchen says: Time is not passing, Time is coming. Keep it coming!