Every word carries weight
AT the Royal Press, every letter and word carries weight.
One Saturday afternoon, I asked Foong Yoke Chan or Ah Chan, the typeface composer at the Royal Press, to design and print for me a business card using the letterpress printing process. The card contains my name, Alvin Ung, and the title of my book, Barefoot Leadership.
Do you want both lines centralised? she asked.
Yes, I said.
No phone number or address? she said.
No need. Only four words, I said.
Ah Chan pulled out a drawer filled with a few thousand alphanumeric movable type to create a letterpress block. She selected 24 letters that formed barefoot leadership; she deftly arranged the pieces of lead along a composing stick backwards, in mirror image.
I will use an italicised font for your name, she said. She walked around the sun-lit room and rummaged through a dozen wooden drawers before selecting the eight letters that comprised my name.
By now, I began to feel bad for troubling her to walk dozens of steps and bend up and down just to compose four words for my business card.
Had I given her my name in Chinese, her task would have increased exponentially given that there were hundreds of thousands of Chinese words catalogued in endless rows of movable type.
Originally posted here:
Every word carries weight