Practicalmadness

On Design Observer there’s a thread about the Jerry Killian memo font controversy (which has got to be the biggest thing in the typographic world since Clarendon Bold was made a corporate vice president at Starbucks), where such luminaries of letterpress as Jonathan Hoefler and Matthew Carter (who designed Verdana and Georgia for Microsoft, as well as commissioned faces for MoMA, The New York Times and Yale University) have come to the following stunning conclusion: we don’t fucking know whether the memos are forged, okay?

The memos in question, which support the theory that Pres. Bush skipped out on his National Guard service (which was itself intended to let him skip out on going to Vietnam) to get drunk, do drugs and other activities that have since been covered up by his family and his administration, were released by CBS following an in-depth 60 Minutes report on the matter. Col. Jerry Killian was Bush’s supervising officer in Texas, who writes about receiving pressure from higher-ups to give the young Dubya good marks on performance reviews so as to speed his transfer to a non-training unit in Alabama.

The memos, which were “to file” and essentially notes to himself, are set in what appears to be Times New Roman, with some typographic effects (a superscripted “th”, so-called ‘smart’ quotes) that (it is argued) were not possible using the sort of typewriter or word processor technology available to an Air Force colonel in the early 70s. The implication is that the memos are bad fakes by someone who thought they could mock something up in Microsoft Word and get away with it.

The prominent typographers on the Observer thread, who are experts on those sorts of effects, their proper use and design, nonetheless are not familiar enough with the technology and whether it happened to be in use in a particular National Guard office by a particular colonel at a particular time to be of any help in solving the mystery. Other than to say that yes, it is awfully peculiar.

Read: Font Forensics, Or Whether George W. Bush Is Hiding Something (Design Observer)