Fungible Convictions

I’m finally getting around to reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (I feel like the only person whose read more Joseph Roth than Philip Roth)(P.S. Thanks, ex-employer, for the free book!). I’m a couple chapter in but keep getting distracted—in the way only the very dorkiest of us do—by how lovely the text’s typeface is.

In fact, it distracted me so much that I kept taking breaks to look online at different types’ glyphs to figure out exactly what typeface designer Robert Overholtzer chose. If you want to guess yourself, here’s a photo of the top of page 52 from the hardcover (click it for a closeup):

I had to resort to a great site called Identifont, which asks you a series of questions about various letters in the text you’re checking and thereby narrows down the possibilities.

Identifont, in this case, made me feel very self-centered. As it turns out, the reason I love the typeface in The Plot Against America so much is that it’s the same typeface I chose for the “formal report” template at my current employer. Here’s a screen grab of some text, where you can see the same typeface—Minion—as used in the Roth novel:

Click for larger.