Part 2 (1/2)

Back on the streets, we were honked at for jaywalking and nearly swiped by a bus. I felt for a moment that we had left the geology behind us, but I was quickly disabused of this notion. A few buildings in from the avenue, we reached a knee-high retaining wall in front of a row house: a short, unlovely white wall separating the sidewalk from the building's trash storage. h.o.r.enstein stopped, to my surprise. Apart from a few bright yellow leaves on its surface, the wall was not something to attract me: it looked filthy. Not to h.o.r.enstein: to him it looked like gold.

”Limestone. This is a limestone from Indiana. Right here, these are worm burrows.”

He fingered a long squiggle on the surface of the wall. It did look like a place a worm had been trapped. But-in the rock?

In the rock. ”This rock was once loose stuff”-sediment-”on the sea floor-and you have sea worms going through it and leaving their trails.” When the rock was soft sediment, ancient marine worms burrowed through it, eating their way along. The worm-shaped traces h.o.r.enstein was pointing out were their paths, chemically changed from pa.s.sing through the worm's digestive system and fossilized after the worm moved on. On the very next building down the street, he found some of the sea worms' old pals: ”Oh, and here's a crinoid! And that's a bryozoan. And that's actually a pelecypod right there.”

These were not familiar animal characters to me, but as I started to pa.r.s.e the variegated surface for signs of past life, h.o.r.enstein explained who we were seeing. Limestone, a popular building material, is full of the sh.e.l.ls, remains, and other traces of ancient animals. In fact it mostly is these fossils and fragments. Like schist, it formed in the Geologically-Long-Ago era, on the floor of the oceans-and this ocean was where the Midwestern United States is now. The movement of ocean waters broke up the sh.e.l.ls of the small invertebrate animals-snails, scallops, other tiny organisms. Crinoids were little creatures with stems of repeated discs, stacked like wafers. Bryozoans were sedentary animals, shaped like fans, much like coral. Pelecypods, scallopy things, left a trace of the familiar seash.e.l.l-by-the-seash.o.r.e.

The crinoid wafers looked like small coins with Os in their center, ancient subway tokens for the sea. Suddenly I saw them everywhere. The worm traces read like ancient graffiti down the length of the building. Taking this in, my view of the street was entirely changed: no longer was it pa.s.sive rock; it was a sea graveyard. I was nearly speechless.

”That's a surprising thing to see on this retaining wall, three-hundred-million-year-old worm tracks,” I managed, as though h.o.r.enstein could make this fact logical and ordinary.

He did not attempt a response. Instead, he indicated for me to follow him. As we continued down the block, h.o.r.enstein was constantly talking. If you think of the city as geology unearthed, it is nonstop: he pointed out features of the sidewalks and streets; walls, roofs, and stairs; atriums, cornices, and decorative rosettes. All were stones; all were known to him. Just this one block, a random sample of any block in this city or any city, contained the history of geology across eras and locales. But it began to look to me like a mash-up history written by lunatics, where red granite from Missouri sat next to stone from Knoxville, Tennessee, and immigrant limestone from France rested alongside the Midwesterners, both politely quiet on the other's accent. Between these sightings were a half dozen of the city's famous brownstones-actually sandstone, I learned, from two hundred million years ago. Underfoot, concrete, made of heated limestone, cement, and pebbles, nudged slabs of quarried granite from Maine and bluestone from Vermont.

We stopped at the bluestone. ”It's from Proctor, Vermont,” he specified. ”It shows a very interesting thing, which we never think about. You see the feathers?”

I laughed. Clearly a trick question.

Wrong. ”See right here? See these lines radiating out? . . . That is where the stone mason hit the stone to split it.”

The stone has multiple stories to tell us, for it has had multiple lives. Every stone has a parent-for the limestone, it is the creatures of the sea-and even in this latest, most quiet phase of its last hundred million years, it has seen some things. Quarries, created to pull stone out of the earth by the tonful, each have distinctive characters, and the people who know stones come to know the quarries from which they have been sourced. Different techniques of harvesting the rock, splitting the rock into workable sizes, and treating the rock result in characteristic pocks and colors. One method of splitting a rock like bluestone into manageable slabs is to use a ”plug” and ”feathers”-just a rod and flanking s.h.i.+ms, which, when hit into the stone at even intervals, causes the stone to split naturally in two. The lines of the split can be seen (h.o.r.enstein called both the tool and the mark it left by the same name), and sometimes even the round hole that housed the plug is clearly visible.

The bluestone's neighbor was a brownstone building whose first-story stone face was textured with pocks. These were the marks of the tools of the stone mason: hammers and chisels used not just to break apart the stone but to decorate it. Two blocks of stone adjacent to each other might have very different pocking, because they were done by different hands.

By the time we reached the end of the block an hour later, I was almost afraid to look around me. This vision of the city as vertical geology had made me dizzy. I could no longer see, and dismiss, a city block as simply a row of uniform buildings neatly snuggled together between avenues. Now the block and its contents appeared to me more as a jumble of geological time and place. Even a single building on West Seventy-sixth Street became a wildly anachronistic historical painting, on examination: Italian marble stood proudly aside 330-million-year-old Indiana limestone, atop 365-million-year-old bluestone from the Catskills and next to boulders of Manhattan schist, some 380 million years old and revealed by retreating glaciers only twelve thousand years ago.

h.o.r.enstein smiled in his gentle way. ”There is so much to entertain you, you know.” He had bestowed on me the ability to be entertained by rocks-not a trivial gift. A street full of rocks, made buildings, becomes a whirlwind tour through eons. I now saw h.o.r.enstein, too, changed by his own expertise. He can never walk down a block and not see its geology. We all have our own chesslike expertise in our heads, the place we know impossibly well, the images with which we are intimately familiar, the fine motor skill or athletic grace we can recognize in other people. h.o.r.enstein's brain, I thought, is full of rocks, arranged on a chessboard of his own reckoning. He shook my hand, turned away, and walked back to the museum, surrounded by his friends.

1 A remarkable example of the natural paving of the land is visible in Northern Ireland, at a place called Clochn na bhFmharach, where a volcanic eruption left tens of thousands of columns of basalt standing like letterpress type well packed in its shelving.

2 This is understating things. The fetid seeds, innocuous-looking yellow cherries, fall seasonally and are mashed underfoot. The butyric acid in their skin makes them, smashed, single-handedly responsible for scores of people stopping and visually investigating that odor coming from the bottom of their shoes. The female tree is the responsible party; the male simply turns delightfully yellow in fall and rains its fan-shaped leaves on merry fall-color-seekers.

3 Well, not all of us. A disorder called prosopagnosia manifests in the inability to recognize faces at all-sometimes even, incredibly and embarra.s.singly, the faces of one's parents, children, or spouse. Oliver Sacks wrote about the strangeness and severity of this condition in one of his early books of essays. The book's t.i.tle, which has almost come to stand in for the singular Sacksian approach, alludes to an event that occurred to a sufferer of face-blindness: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In a very strange subsequent development, Sacks has since revealed himself to be prosopagnosic, a condition he was not himself aware of for many years before writing that book in the 1980s. I cannot do justice to his reflections on his condition in a footnote (though many of his most surprising revelations appear in his own footnotes).

4 This story of the dip in the city's skyline, long told by geologists and retold by John McPhee, was recently called into question by a trio of economists who found, perhaps unsurprisingly, economic forces more explanatory of the city's building patterns. They also found the bedrock less invariant than previously described. Perhaps, as is often the case, both stories have some truth.

”To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”

(Paul Valery).

Minding Our Qs.

”Forgettable, indistinguishable signs topped the stores, advertising pizza and cleaners.”

Paul Shaw shuddered. We were standing in front of an architectural gallery's storefront and facing the quite ordinary-looking, quite benign sign that reported the store's name, mailing address, web address, and opening hours. I read the text. Shaw read not only the letters, but the lettering. ”Helvetica: the usual thing you'd expect”-that is, the kind of typeface architects like to use-”followed by avant-garde Gothic with italic. Eww.” Shaw crinkled his forehead. ”And then Adobe Garamond, italic. . . and then with bad s.p.a.cing. . . .” He trailed off, sounding bemused.

Shaw is afflicted with the disorder of knowing too much-in this case, about the design of letters. It is a disorder that makes one, as Shaw is, a formidable typographer. He is a professional letterhead. Shaw creates lettering-custom lettering and logos, whole typefaces-and studies it, as a writer and on foot. He leads an elaborate, meandering tour through Italy for a small group as keen on contemporary Roman graffito as on medieval and ancient inscriptions. In New York, he has taught calligraphy and typography at Parson's School of Design for over two decades and has stalked Helvetica (and the various non-Helveticas) in the subway system. This malady, this literaphilia, makes one seek, and see, letters. In a city, letters are everywhere.

One trouble with being human-with the human condition-is that, as with many conditions, you cannot turn it off. Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world. And our world is a linguistic one, fas.h.i.+oned in and then described with language.

Early in life, an infant will make certain noises that have special resonance to parents. The varieties of cries, from fussy to outraged, are matched by the round warm coos of satisfaction. The infant vacillates between being a catastrophist and a purring kitten. Soon, though, nearly regardless of what his parents do, as long as they talk around him, that infant will start making different sounds. These hums, burbles, and yammers will be the sounds that make up the language or languages he hears floating above his head. His young brain magically distinguishes the parents' language from the hums, roars, and crashes of nonlanguage sounds in the world.

For the first five years of life, it is said, children learn approximately one word every two hours they are awake. This fact is intended to impress, and it does. From an adult's vantage, the prodigiousness of the infant mind is enviable (even though we have all had that mind). Most of us struggle to remember that new, curious word we read just this morning in the newspaper. In theory, I would like my brain to sponge up words like an infant's does, but in reality, I also find the child's progress terrifying. Every hour, children are losing more and more ability to think without language-and without the cultural knowledge that language pa.s.ses along. Every hour, children are less able to not notice words. And to me, the lack of language is what is enviable.

Don't get me wrong: I am appreciative of the language that allows me to write that I am appreciative of language. I love, covet, and collect words-silly words and finely formed words and words I'll never use but just feel glad to know. My husband and I own hundreds of dictionaries, whose main roles in our lives are first, to wait uncomplaining until they are thumbed through by us, and second, to then offer up such masterpieces of grace and charm as omphalos, amanuensis, and picklesome.

Few of these words, though, will I encounter in an ordinary day. By contrast, every day, when walking in a city, driving along a highway, or existing anyplace but deep wilderness, we are beset by dull, tedious words. Signs and storefronts and billboards and computer screens barrage us with text that we, with our language-besotted minds, cannot help but read. As I write this, I hesitantly peek out my office window, and, without my willing it, my eyes track quickly and inevitably to the text on the side of a taxi: NYC TAXI, it reads. $2.50 INITIAL FARE. On its roof, an advertising billboard commands, BE STUPID. As the taxi pa.s.ses, a stenciled POST NO BILLS is discernible on the scaffolding hulking over the sidewalk. Words are the ample cleavage of the urban environment: impossible not to look at.

Worse still, every city is dense with surfaces, and at some point in human history someone discovered that surfaces are great places to put words and other symbols. Ancient Egypt slaveowners plastered walls with papyrus posters offering a reward for the return of runaway va.s.sals. Greek and Roman merchants placed symbolic signs-a wooden shoe; a stone soup pot-above the doorways of their shops. And the ruins of Pompeii, which in its ashen burial preserved a day in the life of AD 76, has walls covered with notices and inscriptions for real estate (”To rent from the first day of next July, shops with floors over them, fine upper chambers . . .”), advertising gladiatorial games, and promoting electoral candidates (or opposing them: ”The whole company of late risers favor [the election of] Vatia”)-as well as plain old graffiti and personal messaging: ”Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze sweetly” is still inscribed on one wall, at least two millennia after Victoria stopped sneezing for good.

Today we rarely encounter a public surface completely without words. In New York City, signs identifying shops have migrated from the shop face and door onto awnings, banners, and placards thrust into the line of vision of a pa.s.sing pedestrian. Should you hope to escape the linguistic attack by ducking into the subway, you will be sorely disappointed. The support columns, stair risers, and banisters in the subway system are plastered with advertis.e.m.e.nts, excited text and airbrushed photos vacantly hollering as you weave through the crowds. Before freestanding billboards came into urban s.p.a.ces, a building's windowless wall might be painted with an ad. The faded remnants of the paint still peek out from between more recent developments. (The products advertised, the lozenges and carriages of our grandparents' time, are usually as faded as the paint.) In much of New York City, the mere presence of a stretch of wall without words on it is all the prompt a graffitist needs to spray-paint some onto it. Rarely are they wis.h.i.+ng Victoria sweet sneezes.

So I had no concern, on heading downtown to meet Paul Shaw, that we would not see any letters. Still, I wondered, is there any other way to see these words than as linguistic? En route, I gaped at the language that tracked me as I walked down my block, onto a bus, and through a pocket park between avenues. Everything was lettered. Officially, ”lettering” describes letters specially ”drawn, carved, cut, torn,” or otherwise a.s.sembled for the purpose of being displayed. More recently, the words type and font have become lay synonyms for lettering, although you can cause eye-rolling or lip-pursing in a typophile if you use them that way.1 What I was seeing were mostly just letters. I saw letters on street signs and commercial signs; on flyers, telephone booths, and lampposts; as building names; on T-s.h.i.+rts and knapsacks with logos, affiliations, and statements of purpose; on trucks, declaring their master's and their maker's name. Underfoot, the text on the manhole cover (Con Ed, NYC) and discarded potato chip bag (Lay's, 150 calories) lay alongside a mouse-sized flag announcing the application of mouse poison to this area. I waited at a bus-stop shelter with the stop name and bus line printed on it, which lettering was overpowered by an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a television show, which itself was partially covered by a flyer (”room to rent . . . from July 1st . . .”) and marred by a graffitied ”DOOR” etched into the plastic wall of the shelter. The sides of trash bins say things now. The heels of sneakers. Even my toddler son noted that the holey ventilation grate on the business end of window air conditioners is really just a concatenation of letter Os. Instructions, directions, labels, a.s.sertions, names, descriptions, suggestions, and commands abound.

Perhaps I should have challenged Shaw not to see letters. But I was walking with him not to find more letters but to see them in a different light. Shaw is in love with letters-with finding them, making them, and, as though they were rare shy marsupials seen only at night, ”investigating their habitats.” This love may come from some intrinsic Shawness, but it also comes from being a designer and researcher of letters for so long. To me, the TAXI sign says, well, ”taxi.” To a typographer, it says disaster. When the current version of taxicab signage first appeared, there was a low murmur of outcry among those interested in lettering. Among other missteps noted, the NYC and TAXI are set in two separate typefaces, the kerning (s.p.a.cing) on the former is so tight as to make the letters almost illegible, and the word TAXI, which features a circle around the contrast-colored T, really reads ”T-Axi.” There was an art-a lack of art-in those letters. There was a political or personal choice, an anachronism, a misapplication of type font to signage, a readability study gone awry. There was a history in the letters, and Shaw knew it.2 We met on a sunless day in February. As I approached him, grinning and waving, Shaw's shoulders slumped and his hands dove into his pockets. His hair was dramatically unkempt. Although he glanced at me in greeting, his eyes were scouring the surfaces around us: the walls, the fire escapes, the streets, the lampposts and telephone boxes. He was, as always, looking for letters. Shaw himself was linguistically neutral: his jacket and bag had no visible letters on them.

We had decided to walk down a series of blocks across town from where we both lived, down streets unknown to us. Yet I sensed that these streets already had familiar elements to Shaw. Just as architectural styles identify a city, so too is a city recognizable by the type of lettering that predominates. Putting aside the rash of newer, computer-font signs now topping identical cell-phone stores and delis, the lettering that exists and remains on buildings represents when a city was built, how it has evolved, and whether that evolution involved destruction or restoration. New York City's style is hodgepodge, but with a distinctive early-twentieth-century tw.a.n.g. The regularity of Art Deco and Art Moderne lettering tells us that the 1920s and '30s saw a lot of construction in the city-construction of a scale and of a quality that has largely survived. Sans-serif Gothic from the late nineteenth century also appears around town, in raised stone letters on the face of a building, for instance. Like building styles, lettering goes through fads, trends: what looks modern now will look antiquated soon enough; what is brash may soon be ordinary.

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 s.p.a.ce, and pa.s.sersby 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 As and Rs 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ced 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 Rs 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!