Like any complex cultural phenomenon, Blackletter fonts swing
between polar-opposite connotations depending on the era. How, for
example, did this standard typeface of 17th-century Bible printing end
up the go-to aesthetic for gothic horror and faux-satanic metal? In her
impressive monograph collecting 333 Blackletter fonts (just double that
number), Judith Schalansky lets the letters do the talking — and the
Blackletter is a form, apparently, in constant conversation. In the
last decade alone it has gone from use in the butch posturing of metal
and hip-hop to prevalence on handbags and kitschy belt buckles. A new
demographic has taken the Blackletter over, finding in it not brooding
and severe qualities, but ornamental and florid ones. In a word: girly.
As such, Schalansky’s brilliant design seems to bring all meanings
together. Bible-thick, pink and black and with a leatherette cover,
Fraktur mon Amour is the only holy book I could swear an oath on.
LONELY WEREWOLF GIRL ***
Martin Millar
Soft Skull, 560 pages, $18.50
The
UK’s Martin Millar is on a release binge. Before I could even get to
his exquisitely titled Lonely Werewolf Girl, he released his
autobiographical Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me. He’s also about to
re-publish his first novel, the Vonnegut-like satire Milk, Sulphate and
Alby Starvation. As a writer Millar is a genre unto himself and his
epic Lonely Werewolf Girl is a messy jam of a book that incorporates
all his obsessions — punk rock, fantasy and drugs — in the character of
Kalix, an alienated werewolf girl with an eating disorder and panic
attacks. While the book struggles under the weight of its multitude of
plots and creaky genre devices, Millar’s ideas are often hilarious.
Other than Neil Gaiman, he is the only writer attempting to update
fantasy fiction with irony and pop sensibilities.
INSIDE INSIDE **
James Lipton
New American Library, 491 pages, $16.50
Of
course, some monsters are very real. Imagine a creature made by science
but utterly not of this Earth. A man with skin retracted so tight his
mouth is forced into a hideous grin without end, and with a hairline
beginning halfway across his luminous skull. He is graced with an
ordinary name, James Lipton, though he might as well be named Cthulhu.
This host of Inside the Actors Studio could be a friend of Pinhead’s
from Hellraiser. What’s worse, Lipton is cursed to speak forever only
in platitudes about the nobility of acting. According to his damned
manuscript, everything is a “gift,” an “honour.” In his own
fork-tongued words, “When Tom Cruise was on our stage our students
discovered how effortless fame and decency can coexist.” Jamie Foxx is
“enchanting” and, most deliriously, Mike Myers is a “polymath.”