Havin' a Hell of a Good Time Dealin' with the Devil, are ya', Russel?

Interesting bit of trivia for those who are interested and/or superstitious: the very first Design Patent for type, number D1 issued in 1842 to George Bruce, consisted of 666 words.

It's written at the end of the patent, I guess because people who wrote such things got paid by the word in those days.

The devil does deserve his own unicode slot

Speaking of 666....I am from Pittsburgh originally, and Pittsburgh ordered more PCC streetcars, trams in Europe, than any other US city....They ordered 666 to be exact :) :)

Russell, not nice! Blackletter isn't evil, man.

BTW my MyFonts designer number is 666. Laurence assured me it was a coincidence. As far Mankind can tell that is.

hhp

Zeno,
Are you talking about the orange wooden streetcars with the basket seats that I remember as a kid or the red and cream steel trolleys that came later? The Shannon Drake may still be running!

So you took the jump and landed on MyFonts, Hrant? Nice, I've been wanting to see more of your work. Fraktur is the devil! Hmmm maybe I should say that backwards.... Lived eht si Rutkarf!

No jump [yet]. They put everybody on there.

hhp

Am I missing something here? What is is thread about?

I am referring to the ones that came later....Pgh bought the first PCC ever sold...(was going to go to Baltimore but it ended up in Pgh). the PCCs that went to drake are no longer running...The Overbrook track from South Hills Jnct to Castle Shannon were so bad they had to be closed, so they ran a Drake Shuttle with PCCs from Castle Shannon to Drake, but hardly anyone rode it since they did not want to transfer at Castle Shanon...so the PCC Drake Shuttle closed in 1999....When they redid the Overbrook section and reopened it, the Drake line from the spur to South Hills to Drake never re-opened...I doubt it ever will...they have been waiting for "funding" to redo that line forever, doubt it will ever happen...PAT Transit is hurting bad, they just stopped the little used tunnel bypass line that went through Allentown....All weekend LRV service on the Library line will end in September also. Will only run weekdays....As a kid I visited my Grandma in Wilkins burgh each summer and rode the PCC trolleys on the east End of Pgh....they were taken away January, 1967. End of Pittsburgh trolley update LOL

Is this a stream-of-consciousness post-post-modernist sort of performance at this point? I’m guessing either you have an MFA, or this is your thesis.

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well, Chris, it started out as 'Twitter on Typophile'.

Hrant, no offense to Blackletter intended, but you have to admit, there is a certain aura at times.

For years, my office extension was 666 because a born again Christian with the power to assign extensions didn't like the person I inherited the phone from.

I think there's an aura of old-fashioned seriousness (like how in old photos you'll never see anybody smiling vapidly) but paradoxically there's also an expressive warmth there too. It's a "crystalline flower" (see Bain and Shaw's book).

hhp

True, Hrant.

Lucifer in "Christian Satanism", if you can call it that, is all tied up in Christian symbols by definition. It uses the same "branding" as the church and turns it on its ear. Upside down crosses and all that.

The typical portrayal of the devil is just comical, and as many actors have pointed out, the bad guy is just a more interesting role to play. In the same spirit, I think is the common association of blackletter with things satanical by metal bands, tattoo parlors etc.

Real evil is banal - More like Helvetica or Arial. Guaranteed, a contract with the devil these days would be set in either of those two fonts, depending on what OS the devil favours.

:o)

Well put! :-)

hhp

@Christopher – I think it began about an Iron Maiden song, then added Bruce Springsteen.

No, Té, it began as a limerick along the lines of:
There once was a maiden named Sue...

There once was a typophile named Sue
666 glyphs she loved true...

n.