Open Writing

“Listen to the Mustn'ts, child,” the great poet Shel Silverstein advised, “listen to the Don'ts./ Listen to the Shouldn'ts, the Impossibles, the Won'ts./ Listen to the Never Haves, then listen close to me./ --Anything can happen, child, Anything can be.”

That’s usually good advice, but some conceptions are simply bad ideas, sometimes fatally so. In 430 BCE, for example, the Greek philosopher Empedocles tried to convince his countrymen that he’d been summoned to Olympus by the gods by secretly jumping into an active volcano so no trace of him could be found, but someone spilled the beans. A few centuries later Chrysippus, another Greek philosopher, got his donkey drunk and laughed himself to death watching it try to eat figs. More recently, a devout Mughal emperor named Humayun died at his library in 1556 CE. He’d been on the library roof looking at Venus and was descending the stairs when he heard the “adhan,” or call to prayer. Humayun stepped on his robes trying to kneel and fell downstairs to his death.

Seventy-five years ago author Scott Fitzgerald went through a bunch of bad ideas for naming his new book. He’d considered and rejected “The High Bouncing Lover,” “Among the Ash Heaps,” and “Trimalchio,” the latter being a character from “The Satyricon.” This long story-poem was written by the Roman Petronius Arbiter, whose resume included being Emperor Nero’s “director of pleasures.” Petronius’ Trimalchio was an ostentatiously rich man who flaunted his wealth through lavish parties, but the classical allusion was so tenuous that Fitzgerald decided to use his novel’s principal character and named it “The Great Gatsby.” Not that it mattered much; in 1927 Fitzgerald cleared $153 in royalties on it, and two years later, only $32.

The writing of “Gatsby” itself remains basically a good idea, unlike the letter apparently forged last year by Lucille Hester. Hester claims football great Bullet Bob Hayes was her half-brother, that he’d written a letter and gave it to her shortly before his death in 2002, and asked her to read it publicly if he was posthumously admitted to the pro football Hall of Fame. Hayes won Olympic gold in the 1960s, and starred with the Dallas Cowboys. Alcohol and drugs ruined his post-football life, but he remained a nice man whose speed changed the nature of football.

Hayes was elected to the Hall of Fame last February, and Hester, whom Bullet Bob’s family says was really a childhood friend of Hayes, read the letter to the press and claimed sister’s rights to his rings and trophies. It turned out that the letter she claimed had been written and signed by Hayes in 2002 was actually printed using a type font not invented until 2007. This font, Calibri, is the default typeface used by newer Microsoft Office products. Microsoft commissioned several type designers to create the “Clear Type Font Collection,” a set of five fonts that are easier to read both on computer screens and in print.

Calibri’s not my type of font. For one thing, Calibri doesn’t have serifs, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “a fine line finishing off the main strokes of a letter.” The purpose of these little flourishes at the bottoms, tops and edges of letters is to help guide readers’ eyes to following letters. There are several types of serifs. “Spurs,” for instance, are smaller serifs, like those often seen on the ends of “S’s.” The larger “beaks” appear on the arms of many capital “E’s” and “T’s.”

Serifs are commonly used for smaller printing, like text, while sans serif fonts, or letters without the flourishes, are more legible for larger letters as used in titles and headlines. That’s why the 2007 Encyclopedia Britannica writes that “almost every study ever completed has indicated that sans serif type is less easy to read in text than is type with the serif.”

Maybe Microsoft will get it right next time. Even librarians sometimes goof up. But as Carl Jung noted, “Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.”