A formality, sure, to include this sort of thing
at the end of a book, and it’s a formality of my
own that leads me to read it, the way that I’ll
eat the wilted garnish on a plate just for the
satisfaction of seeing the plate empty,
a satisfaction comparable to the back cover of a book,
knowing that every word has been gobbled up.
I like to imagine that there are readers
out there reading only in anticipation of this bland dessert,
this decorative, colorless, flavorless lettuce leaf,
having made their way through pages of wilted romance
or stringy suspense or overcooked plot solely for this,
to find out the fascinating history of the font that
has been there with them like a soul through hundreds of pages
and that had seemed ordinary enough, like any other,
until, that is, you get to really know it,
until you read the description of its “branching lines”
and its “dew-drop serifs,” its “pinched lower-cases” and “supple capitals,”
and find that it wasn’t inspired by Times, as most must be,
but rather by an older, more history-leaden font,
as anyone looking at the lower-case i would see right away.
For me, I’d like a note on the paper added too, or the glue,
or the ink itself, which seems most likely
to have the most serpentine path of all from squid to page.
In some restaurants, it’s de rigueur to include the history of the
potatoes that had made the fries on a chalkboard,
this little touch of the artisan among the mass-produced–
“Fries proudly sourced from Something Farms,
in the Somewhere Valley of Someplace, Idaho”–
and it was enough to consider the fry for what it once was,
and imagine the spud dug from the earth on an indigo-cold morning.
It’s that story, the “note” I’d like to see, telling what kind of tree
this paper came from, nature’s lines and serifs, telling what was the quality
of its life and was it worth hacking down?, is this a greater or lesser purpose?,
was it better off before it was felled, its snapping trunk breaking the
quiet of a still morning, the sun just risen,
before it would be held in hand to be touched and turned and smelled–
oh, the smell–and then put back on the shelf
to be mostly forgotten but dry, above-ground, unrotten?
It makes me grateful that, after I die,
I won’t be pulped and bound,
sitting on a shelf, rather than contentedly rotting
back into the earth made of the rot of everything else,
the great family of all rot, all my parts going their separate ways
as if theirs is some urgent business they have to get to,
while someone–their parts still theirs–stands at
a headstone and, after a moment of
brief reading, checks the back of the marble,
looking to see if there is any information,
a note on the type printed on the headstone,
for this note on the type buried below.
“A Note on the Type” first appeared in Willows Wept Review
Goddfrey Hammit. 