MadCraneSkillz DemiBold 12

If I had to pick the notion of something that I'd have no shot at making money at, as a calling in life, (well, besides going full-time as a quiz bowl dilletante,) I'd have to give pause to the notion of historian of typefaces. I've had a longstanding fascination with letters, if not words, ever since I had one of the old 1984-era Macs, some people trainspot, others shout "hey, it's that guy", I sit there going "Is that Trade Gothic?" In relation to the previous post, I sometime try and figure out the age of office buildings by observing the fonts they use. But realism sets in, and I have to think it's the real life equivalent of Mad Crane Skillz (you can check the CMU lexicon for this). So if you would have told me the most pressing issue in the campaign season is the need for forensic typography, well, you can see where I was thinking I missed an opportunity in life. Being the Cyril Wecht of fonts, a talking head called upon once every 20 years... It's no Bond villain, but it's not bad.

I'm not even certain they're complete frauds at this point (I'm leaning about 65% that way, 30% there's something else going on here, some form of incompetence explaining away malice, and 5% these actually are completely true.) The interesting bit I'm seeing in this is the almost direct parallel between what I'm seeing in people in the Killian memos situation, and what went on in the pursuit of the Hitler Diaries ("Smooth, Dwight," he thinks, "antagonize your political readers on both sides, AND invoke Godwin's Law. Real smooth.") My source for this being the account Selling Hitler by Robert Harris, which is a good and surprisingly amusing history of the scam in the early '80s, whose aftermath basically torched the careers of a number of media and publishing figures in Germany. (My copy even comes with an amusing picture of British comedian Alexei Sayle in a funny moustache, as I believe it became a British TV movie.) In the German case, it was clear that the documents weren't right, but people involved desperately, irrationally wanted them to be right. The bit that topped this for me was how Konrad Kujau decided to make his forgeries extra enticing to the buyers:

As a finishing touch, he stuck some imitation metal initials in gothic script on the cover. The initials were bought by Kujau in a department store, were made of plastic in Hong Kong, and were in fact 'FH', not 'AH' as Kujau had thought. It was, like all his forgeries, slipshod and homemade. It would not have withstood an hour's expert examination.

--Selling Hitler, p. 117