Fontaholic

It started innocently enough.

In the fourth grade, I won a merit award for my excellent handwriting.

Later, like many adolescent girls, I enjoyed experimenting with my handwriting. I went through a phase of putting circles or hearts over my J's and I's. I went through a period of drawing rather strange letter forms for the letter S and the lower case letter R. I played with various descenders and ascenders. I played. It's common enough, isn't it? Don't most girls go through that?

So eventually I found a handwriting that was my own. Half writing, half printing, lower case G looks like a figure-eight, lower case R is a sort of line with a dip on top. Fairly artistic, very much unique.

You'd think that would be enough, but it wasn't.

At the age of eighteen, I bought a pen. A special pen. One with a special tip, a flat nib. It was a Shaeffer fountain pen with a small plastic ink cartridge. And I learned calligraphy.

Oh, the hours I spent and the ink and the paper I wasted, drawing the alphabet over and over. Drawing my own name, my boyfriend's name, my dog's name, any name I could think of, my address, the Gettysburg Address, St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, you name it, I wrote it.

And I loved it.

Eventually, I branched out. I learned new alphabets, I tried new techniques. I moved from the Shaeffer pen to an Osmiroid with a gold-plated tip, and which had a refillable ink bladder as well as cartridges. I got a set of dip-pens and india ink.

Oh, sure, people loved to get Christmas cards or thank-you notes from me, because the envelopes were decorated with nicely done calligraphy, but at what cost to me? I didn't even realize then what I was getting into....

Windows. True Type fonts. Oh, the agony and the glory of them. Resizable at will, printable, you could play with them any way you wanted! FONTS, FONTS, FONTS! I even found my favorite, my beloved Vivaldi, a lovely ornate script based on an Italian chancery.

My love of the letter and almost immediate love of computers combined with the new technology of the early nineteen-nineties to produce a nearly insatiable appetite for fonts. Nevermind that I didn't need any of them, I just wanted them. Sometimes I would make up fake documents and announcements just to play with the lovely fonts and experiment with combinations and point sizes.

I was in bad shape, but I didn't yet realize the gravity of the situation.

And then I discovered the Internet.

Then comes a period of .... I don't remember all of it. I recall that there were font archives, lots of them, and there were ... oh, the fonts. The fonts. The fonts, they were there, they were available at the click of a button, oh, the glorious rush of finding the perfect copperplate script font, or a dingbat font with exactly the character you've wanted for years and years and been unable to find! Oh, the sweet, exhilirating thrill of it!

And then....

My hard drive....

.... had a breakdown.

Gone. All my programs, a good deal of irreplacable personal writings such as journals and essays, and....

I'm trying not to tremble, but the memories are pretty vivid .... The fonts were gone. All of them. Totally gone. Unusable, irretrievable, gone. Ashes, all of it.

As I rebuilt the remnants of my file system, I did, in fact, take stock of my addiction and take action.

I made backups of all my fonts, on a separate drive, and later, burned them all to CD.

And I also got a good font manager program, so that I don't have so many fonts installed in memory all at once (hey, 1500+ fonts take up a lot of memory!).

Finally, I'm gaining control of my addiction. I'm learning to manage my need for fontage, my craving for dingbats, my desire for hand-drawn alphabets nicely turned into those miraculous things we know of as fonts.

I'm all right now, or at least, I'm getting better.