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Make it to Macon, Georgia, July 1988
Convention Time
Nothing seems to fly by as fast as that one year between conventions. We have found that going to the amateur journalism convention of your choice is a genuine vacation. It is a time well spent in true relaxation with warm friends and interesting things to do. We never return exhausted from conventions as opposed to the more typical vacations most people endure, such as trying to make it between Miami, Montreal and Monterey inside of four days.
The greatest pleasure is getting to meet the faces of the authors we have enjoyed, or been annoyed by, in the bundles. Be prepared for some surprises. Ajay writers are a very mixed lot.
For pure excitement with a lot of laughs, do not miss the auction at the convention. Yes, there is a lot of lead type and printing equipment, but there is also a good selection of ajay papers and books to whet your appetite. And, ajay auctions are not pricey. You get a lot of bargains thrown in with the chuckles.
Other Than Adobe Fonts
While the Adobe Corp. owns (and rents) the rights to the Postscript program for creating fonts which are not found in many brands of laser printer, they are not the only supplier. A few other companies offer Postscript fonts which print with just as fine a quality as Adobe’s with one important difference; price.
Adobe fonts cost $135 to 187 for a single font which includes the variations of bold, italic, and bold-italic. The competitors sell their fonts for less than half that price.
Although Adobe recently signed a deal to bring out 1,700 ATF fonts, they do not own them all, especially a number of titling fonts which are offered by three other companies: Image Club, Software Complement and Invincible. The following page shows a sampling of these other fonts. Many will look familiar though they carry a new name. For example, Liberty looks a lot like Goudy Hand Tooled. Calgary is a variant of Barnum. Michelle (misspelled as Micelle) is a dead ringer for Gallia. Hobnob is Hobo in disguise.
The sudden explosion of fancy fonts in the world of desktop typesetting has brought with it a sort of fontish fad. Those customers who know nothing about page composition frequently get carried away and plaster their pages with an odd assortment of four or five mismatched fonts; all of which are usually far too flamboyant for the text. Much the same thing must have happened at the close of the 19th century. They had a similar explosion of what might be called “organic typography” which is evident in the advertising copy of those days. That spasm of wild fonts did not calm down until the sleek modern styles of the 1920s overwhelmed everything.
What’s a Fossil?
What’s a Fossil, you may ask? Why you are one of course, if you have been active in this ajay hobby for no less than three years. In the early days of amateur journalism, the participants were mostly youngsters in their teens. As they grew to adulthood, and moved on to other, more serious pursuits, they still had a soft spot in their hearts for the ajay hobby. Hence, a group of these “older” journalists formed an organization to preserve the history of amateur journalism.
Because these founding members were well into their twenties, they named themselves The Fossils, Inc. and to this day publish a quarterly journal called The Fossil.
I am the current editor of The Fossil and do not blush at all when I tell you that it is a finely wrought publication, chock full of ajay legend, history and who-was-whom in the world of amateur journalism. Did you know that Thomas Edison was once a Fossil?
Please contact the Secretary/Treasurer for a membership application.
Keith M. Gray
Mundelein, IL 60060
Dues are only $15 per year ($20 husband and wife) for which you get to read all about the history of amateur journalism; the recent and the long-gone as well.
Colophon
Done in Baskerville and Optima typefaces on some very slick paper – Warren Lustrecote. This is a coated stock which presents quite a challenge to a small offset press. If I did it right, there should not be any set-off.
This time I printed a separate issue for the AAPA. The last issue was all NAPA stuff sent to both organizations.
J. A. Diachenko,
La Plata, MD 20646