In a post on his Paper Cuts blog a couple days back, New York Times Book Review staffer Dwight Garner has some fun with the overly pretentious “note on the type” pages that appear in the back of some books:

I’m sitting here, for example, with an advance edition of Orhan Pamuk’s forthcoming book Other Colors: Essays and a Story, to be published in September by Knopf. At the back, the “Note on the Type” tells us: “The text of this book was set in a typeface called Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison (1889-1967) for The Times (London) and first introduced by that newspaper in 1932.”

Okay so far.

But did Knopf need to add that Stanley Morison was considered “a writer of sensibility, erudition, and keen practical sense”?

Garner also points to Stacey Grenrock Woods’ new memoir, I, California, which “ends not with a note on the type but a note to what seems to be the text’s petsitter.” The note is reproduced in full in Garner’s post.

Quillblog, for the record, is set in Georgia, which, according to this Wikipedia entry, was designed by Matthew Carter “for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes, partially due to a relatively large x-height.” No word on Carter’s erudition or sensibility, but we’ll look into it.