Optima: A Love Poem

OPTIMA (A Love Poem)

I believe in love at first sight:

I once bought a book for its cover.

It was the face – not human nor animal - a font face.

I was young and thought myself a bit foolish

for having done such

a thing.

Now I know how a letter can hold the past

and foretell the future.

How the arch of an R

says all there is to know about cathedrals

and flying buttresses;

How the straight spine of a T

makes you get up in the morning

in spite of a broken heart;

How the perfect O

defines the ten thousand things

while opening the space of infinite possibility.

How the hand in motion carves the world

out of nothing.

RDA

7/16/2015

Note: Optima is a font designed by the legendary Hermann Zapf. The story goes that in 1950, while in Florence, Italy, Zapf chanced upon an ancient tombstone into which letters had been carved in classic Roman capitals. But they lacked the usual serifs; instead the letters flared slightly at the ends. Zapf

had nothing on which to make a sketch, so he pulled out a 1000 lira banknote and made the first sketches of what would become Optima on the paper money.

In the early 1970's, after hammering out dozens of high school papers on a small, electric typewriter with the dumpy Courier typeface, Optima blazed across my vision like a redeeming angel. I have been blessed with a last name that contains some my favorites of the noble letters: A R M