Typefaces usually make it into the newspapers only as a way to deliver the news, and rarely as the news itself. Mark 2004 as a banner year, then, with the State Department's publicized ditching of Courier 12 and last fall's "superscriptgate" kerfuffle over doctored documents concerning President Bush's military service (or lack thereof). Another starring role—albeit a "typecast" one—came in July, when The New York Times announced that the inscription on the granite cornerstone of the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan was to be rendered in Gotham. Striking indeed was the Times's care in explaining the provenance of the font, designed four years earlier by Hoefler Frere-Jones Typography for GQ magazine, as well as the useful ambiguity of its esthetic effects. "Seen one way, the cornerstone's darkness and plainness are memorial, even funereal," the Times observed. "Seen another, the radiant silver-leaf letterforms conjure the exuberant, modernist, mid-century optimism of New York even as they augur the glass and stainless-steel tower to come."
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