On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (9 page)

The block on which we began was chock-full of letters. I tended to see them as words, though, not just strings of letters: I
read
them.
GALLERY HOURS, AUTO SERVICE, WHOLESALE LIGHTING, 24-HOUR DRIVEWAY,
the always-perplexing
HOT DOGS PIZZA
combination. We stood in front of a gallery named “Storefront for Art & Architecture.” It has a locally famous facade, with irregularly shaped wall panels that pivot on hinges opening over the sidewalk. Exhibits bleed out into pedestrian space, and passersby are swept into the art merely by the act of choosing to walk on the north side of the street. Less famous is the lengthy signage spelling out the gallery’s name, which runs along the forty or so feet of storefront. Standing directly in front of it, Shaw noted that the lettering appeared unnaturally broad and tightly squeezed between two horizontal planes. The legs of the
A
s and
R
s were widely splayed; the ampersand had become a squat croissant. Then he realized, they were not meant to be read by us. At least, not by us standing where we were. We took five steps backward toward the street corner: yes, that was more like it. The letters were designed to be read
in approach
: they were stretched and
distorted so that from an angled approach, they all looked to be the same size. From this vantage, the gallery name was perfectly legible.

As I loitered, admiring the gallery’s way of luring people closer, I mumbled something to Shaw. But Shaw was gone. Indeed, Shaw was continually going missing from my side, pursuing some new letter, as we walked together. He darted to the curb to take in a second-story shop sign from a proper distance; he stopped cold to add to his collection of photos of
NO PARKING
signs, an unglamorous but very common sign in this city of more-cars-than-parking-spots.

“I look at everything,” he said in response to my query about whether he had a preference for a kind of lettering—on a sign or on the ground, deliberate or inadvertent. “When I do walking tours, I forget to look where I’m going.” With all the signs, a person could get lost.

We passed a yellow
NO PARKING
sign painted on a pull-down garage door. The door was topped by red lettering for an auto-service shop:
PARK IN AUTO SERVICE.
To the side, there were more letters, climbing up the building: small printed signs on the sides of fire escapes at each floor. All were unlovely to my eyes: a verbal mess, part of the visual cacophony of the city. But Shaw stopped to admire them, to look at them directly.

“It’s from the forties,” he said. It took me a minute to realize he was talking about the awkward auto-service sign. I looked. The letters were jaunty, in the way that uneven, improperly spaced lettering can be, like a child’s handwriting. It looked like a bit of a mess to me. But not to Shaw. If we looked around us, most of the shop signs were computer-printed vinyl signs, undistinguished and undistinguishable from one another. Given the ubiquity of the generic shop sign these days, this odd sign became more interesting. “It’s hard to find anything that’s unique. And somebody
had to cut these letters out of wood or something.” He paused, finally conceding, “They’re all strange.”

Their strangeness became more clear as we peered at it. “The
U
” [in
AUTO
] “appears backwards.” Now that he said it, I could see it: the right leg was heavier, thicker, than the left leg. I realized that I knew—without explicitly knowing it—that the thicker leg of a letter
U
is usually the leading leg. I impulsively enlarge and embolden the font I am typing in, Garamond. Its left leg is subtly thicker. Cambria, too. Times. Palatino. One of Shaw’s creations, Stockholm. They all wear an asymmetry that we know about but have never seen.

“The
V
”—in
SERVICE
—“is backwards, too,” Shaw continued. “The
R
s are very high waisted.”

He was on a roll. The diagnoses came fast and furious now. “The
E
is not high, but the
A
of course can’t be. The
A
has to be lower. The
N
has a serif in the lower right, which you often don’t find, but in this particular, I won’t call it
style,
but with these sort of triangular serifs, that is one place that you do find serifs. It seems to be a piece of wood, but it could be cut out of metal, so . . . they probably were using some kind of blowtorch. And that might explain why the kerns are a little bit different. . . . And the
S
is in two pieces: it has very nice curves.”

Shaw’s ability to find interest in this splendidly dull, unattractive sign was humbling. I was not only dismissive of the sign, I had a dismissive response built in to my perceptual system, to allow me to avoid even seeing this kind of sign to begin with. Now that I looked at it, I still did not find it attractive. But it had its own character, animated by Shaw’s attention. I felt pleased for the sign that it stood boldly individualistic among boring vinyl-awning lettering. Good for you, Auto Service!

This is not to say that Shaw was not judgmental. As we proceeded, I was treated to his verdict on various letters on our route.
This verdict was usually rendered as a version of “That’s
awful
!” loitering on the
awww
to emphasize the emotion behind that assessment: it
hurt,
it was so awful. As I learned, the ways that lettering awfulness can happen are various. In one case, a sign’s typeface looked to have been stretched on the computer, distorting the letters; in another, the type had been unnaturally squeezed, making the letters plainly uncomfortable. Here, a random final letter was made larger, for no reason (the awfulness of arbitrariness); there, it was the wrong typeface for the building (the awfulness of unsuitability). Another was awful for being mechanically cut, not hand cut. A further awfulness used two versions of a letter form in the same word. We saw, of all things, a shop that makes and sells signs. Its sign was particularly awful.

Shaw looked despondent. This despondency lasted approximately three seconds.

“Look at that!”

I looked. If you are interested in letters, there is a lot of awful about, but there is always something else to see. Shaw was facing a shop whose sign read “
PACIFIC AQUARIUM & PET.
” It was what I, with my non-professional sign vision, would have called “an ordinary sign.” Red lettering attached to a long stretch of yellow plastic announced what was probably a desultory array of fishbowls and small birds inside. The sign did not tell us much else. If pressed, I could probably have said that the sign was not new: its style seemed dated, and the whole thing looked to have been battered by weather. My interest was waning, but Shaw’s was percolating.

“It’s a
Q
!”

The lettering was all in capital letters. I followed his gaze to the
Q
of
AQUARIUM
. There
was
something different about it. My eyes were slowly adjusting to seeing letters in this light: it was plainly not as
Q
y as
Q
s usually are. We stared up at it, our Adam’s apples flashing the passersby, who followed our gaze and looked back at
us for the explanation not forthcoming. Still, it took me a surprisingly long time to see what Shaw had presumably seen immediately. Then I saw it: “The
Q
has an internal limb,” I exclaimed happily. The flourish of a leg that makes an
O
a
Q
was turned inside, instead of pointing out. It was an inverted belly button.

Shaw smiled approvingly. As if in explanation for his grin, he elaborated: “What looks like an ordinary sign from the past, is not. That
Q
is perfect for it.” It was a
Q
he had never seen before.

Was it beautiful? I like
Q
s as much as the next person, but I had not been particularly moved by this one. Still, its eccentricity plainly animated an otherwise unremarkable sign. The
Q
was probably specially designed so its tail did not extend into the phone number sitting below it. I began thinking about
Q
s and the problems that they might present.

It was hardly only
Q
s, though. Over an hour’s walk, we encountered lots of problems, and Shaw was happy to enumerate them.

Of a Park’s Department sign: “Well, lettering on brick is a problem. . . .”

Of a sign that sat away from the wall: “Well, it’s made worse from the depth—there’s the shadow problem. . . .”

Lettering around a curve: “It’s hard to make letters with straight serifs going around a curve and it’s worse if you don’t space them out further,” which they had not.

The “horrible gap” created in the space between a
T
and an
h
: like
This
and
That,
which can be partially solved by a ligature:
Th
usly.

Problem letter combinations: “the double
t
in
settlement
. Always a very tough thing . . .”

“. . . And the problems with the
R
s.”

The problem with the
R
s?

The more we looked, the more problems with letters we
found. Any time I felt my gut twist on seeing a sign, I could just turn to Shaw with a plaintive
Why so bad?
look, and he would diagnose the malady. I realized that I had been blithely walking by undiagnosed lettering disasters my whole life—fairly like the hidden psychological frailties of passing strangers, I supposed.

Shaw’s whole perception—his ability to see the art of the letters, and to be moved by the awful or glorious—is evidence of an element of his own psychology. We all have an aesthetic, even emotional reaction to particular scenes or objects we see. Some researchers theorize that we have an innate hunger to pursue visual stimuli that give us pleasure. When we sate that hunger, a flood of the brain’s natural opioids is released. What, exactly, gives us pleasure? Things rich with information, packed tight with perceptual pudding that calls forth the knowledge we have and associations we have made with similar experiences in the past. In this way, Shaw’s expertise allows him to get a kind of natural high from seeing a beautiful letter.

 • • • 

Over the course of our walk, it was cold enough that my fingers lost their normal flow of blood and the batteries in my tape recorder quietly stopped generating a charge. Shaw, by contrast, seemed to get more energy as we went. As he explained what it was that I did not see, his eyebrows were working, raising and lowering in emphasis, his blinks fast and spirited. At times it seemed as though he was talking
to
the letters themselves, as though they were animate, living creatures. His language about letters certainly evoked a kind of humanity.

An
O,
squished between an
S
and
N,
looked “uncomfortable.” Another letter was “jaunty.” In prose and speech, Shaw appropriated the language of the human body to highlight anything unusual about the characters he found: an ampersand was “pregnant”;
an
R
“long-legged”
; and an
S
“high-waisted.” On the web, lettering and typography discussion boards sprinkle animistic characterizations among the professional jargon: an
S
“is a bit depressed,” another is “complacent”; an
R
“curtsies,” a
G
is “tipsy”
, a
J
“suicidal”; one letter design “needs more humanisticness.” There is a lot of humanisticness to borrow, in fact. As Shaw and I passed by people on the sidewalks, I started mentally reckoning which of their features I could use to describe the letters we were seeing. I pictured a “squinty,” small-holed
B
; a “large-nosed”
P
wearing a heavy top; a “short-necked”
f
with its crossbar squished at its top.

Most of the letters we saw on our walk were plainly visible, if not usually so closely examined. But it has become the sport of some city buffs to find letters that are mostly invisible: ghost signs. These signs have been intentionally removed, painted over, replaced, or neglected to the point of nearly—but not quite—disappearing altogether. Discovery of one is pleasurable in the way that finding that a cashier has handed you an old Indian-head nickel is pleasurable. I keep these nickels, little totems of the past. And I mentally collect ghost signs, nodding up at them from the street as I walk by. When new construction causes the demolition of an old, tall building, I scan the sides of the adjacent buildings now freshly exposed for evidence of dormant advertising on their broad, windowless walls. To find the occasional nickel, to spy large painted capital letters heralding
CORRUGATED BOXES • BOUGHT AND SOLD
on a building’s flank, makes me feel that if only my eyes were really open all the time, I would see these glimpses of the past everywhere.