Fabulae

Colophon

Colophon Just now the typographer’s a comes into being. Her hands have ached to shape its curves: many strokes of black, then white, then again black, taking a long time to dry in between: flawless, the letter has always belonged to the world. Typeface does not correspond to a, or b, or c, nor the shoulders of m, nor the sweet hooks of lower-case gs, but to all the letterforms— “The beauty that radiates from the work of men,” said Eric Gill, making the slope of the buttocks and shoulders and the small tight backs of his lovers into the Gill Sans type that letters the London Underground, “is the beauty of holiness.” The typographer’s a, now finished, will be reproduced digitally and set into text columns, sale circulars, billboards. If a word is elegy to what it signifies, does woman disappear? Words say what they will against us, but the serif of a hangs still as an earring. My body is here at the end of idea, at the center of eat, say, dance. 57 ...