La linéale géométrique dans un labyrinthe étranger

Ikoku Meiro no Croisée, or La croisée dans un labyrinthe étranger, was a pleasant surprise and one of my favourite shows this season. Even though Junichi Sato is only doing series composition, it still feels like Aria. We have girls leaving their homes to go to a strange foreign land and learn about it, set to classy music. All we have to do is trade MANHOME for Japan, Space-Venice for Paris, 23rd century for 19th century, and strings for clarinets.

But there was one thing that caught my eye and has bugged me ever since.

Now, I’m not a graphic design student or anything. I just think typography is cool, so please bear with me as I play amateur type historian. I’m also not that confident in my ability to identify typefaces on the spot. I’m relying heavily on Linotype’s excellent sans serif history articles and Robert Bringhurst’s excellent The Elements of Typographic Style for more general stuff. I’ve been using a combination of Identifont and FontBook to attempt to identify stuff. Anyhow, I expect I will say some wrong things.

A few months ago, I got the chance to read through some type history for a paper. While most of it was on neoclassical type, which was late 1700s/early 1800s, I did skim through 19th and 20th century stuff. Armed with that knowledge, I thought it was a bit weird seeing stores with sans serif signage in general. But other than the problem of sans serifs possibly existing before they were created, they just felt wrong because they looked too “new”. Croisée is set some time in the second half of the 19th century and a quick search revealed that the earliest sans serif faces showed up early in the 19th century but didn’t get big until almost 100 years later.

So I’m pretty sure this is Futura. If it’s not, it’s definitely a geometric sans serif. And as it turns out, geometric sans serifs are products of the early 20th century, with Futura being created in the 1920s. Geometric faces are born from attempts to form idealized letterforms out of circles and lines, coming out of the whole Constructivist movement. It’s a pretty huge contrast to anything from the Romantic era, which is why it look so strange hiding among all of the old shops in the Galerie.

Here, we have what appears to be Helvetica, that venerable Swiss typeface that is used everywhere nowadays, from subway signage to being slapped on photos on tumblr. Or, at least, I’m pretty sure it’s Helvetica, based on the G. The problem is that Helvetica was created in the 1950s. Of course, that’s not a lot of letters to go by and it could be one of Helvetica’s ancestors, but the earliest of those seems to have appeared in the 1880s or 1890s at the earliest. These typefaces, called Grotesques, were pretty popular in Germany, but didn’t catch on elsewhere until the 20th century. This might make its appearance in Paris a little strange, although I’m not sure of the exact timeline.

On this cart, we have a gothic sans serif. Gothics are a British creation from the late 19th century and early 20th century. These are recognizable as the ones that show up in old-timey newspaper headlines. Again, I’m not sure about the exact timeline so I’m not sure how it propagated in Europe, but they were pretty popular in the States. However, it’s my understanding that very few gothics were drawn before 1900.

Finally, here’s what appears to be a humanist sans serif, based on the R and the C. Humanists are supposed to resemble writing more than the mechanical construction of geometrics or grotesques, but it’s hard to tell from just the capital letters. And again, since there aren’t too many letters to go by, it could turn out to be something else, but I don’t recall seeing anything that resembles that C when going through the other early 20th century typefaces. Anyhow, I feel like that could’ve come straight off of a Windows 7 screen or something.

I focused on sans serif typefaces because they’re relatively easy to pick out and differentiate between. I’m not pro enough to be able to distinguish between serifed fonts yet. But, this little exercise makes me wonder if there isn’t any typographical weirdness lurking among the signage set in serif faces.

I got started on this entire thing because I remembered Mark Simonson writing about the fonts on the maps in the Indiana Jones movies. I actually didn’t think about it until that Le Papillon d’Or sign caught my eye and made me go ‘waaaaaaait a second’. It’s the first time I remember doing that for anime, probably because most of the time, the signs are in Japanese. I guess the fact that it’s trying to present an accurate historical depiction of Paris also creates a sort of uncanny valley effect and things that would normally get passed over start to pop out.

Anyway, everyone should watch this show, because clarinets and cheese and baguettes and 19th century weeaboos and Yuneeeeeeeeee.