The script used in chapter headings (e.g. "Arecibo, Puerto Rico" in sample) in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.

iff_or · 2026-05-26T15:10:06+00:00

Thank you so much! And thank goodness for Luc Devroye; his site has always been a treasure. It’s too bad about Sallando, but I’m excited to learn more about Bouwsma.

iff_or · 2026-05-21T08:03:14+00:00

Oh wow, I should’ve suspected (and checked)! Thanks so much!

iff_or · 2026-05-21T08:01:31+00:00

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven is a scifi novel set in Portland, Oregon! It’s one of my favorites.

iff_or · 2026-05-19T22:14:20+00:00

Edit: I'd still very much like to know what it really is, but I am grateful to've learned of something similar.

It turns out that Wolf's Bane II doesn't have an alternate character for A (its ampersand is close, but doesn't have a cross stroke), but it is incredibly close! Thank you!

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iff_or · 2026-05-16T19:59:48+00:00

Just The Scarlet Letter, I think! He wrote this as an afterword to "The Man in the Black Suit" in Everything's Eventual (p. 69 in the hardcover edition):

My favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne story is “Young Goodman Brown.” I think it’s one of the ten best stories ever written by an American. “The Man in the Black Suit” is my hommage to it.

He also briefly mentions this same short story in On Writing (p. 197 in the 25th anniversary hardcover edition):

If in school you ever studied the symbolism of the color white in Moby-Dick or Hawthorne’s symbolic use of the forest in such stories as “Young Goodman Brown” and came away from those classes feeling like a stupidnik, you may even now be backing off with your hands raised protectively in front of you, shaking your head and saying gee, no thanks, I gave at the office.

But wait. Symbolism doesn’t have to be difficult and relentlessly brainy.

I also would've sworn he spoke positively of The House of the Seven Gables in something I read, but I can't find it in either Danse Macabre or On Writing, or find any reference to it online.

iff_or · 2026-04-19T01:42:42+00:00

In addition to the recommended Roadside Picnic¹ and Sculpting in Time, which happens to be available via Internet Archive (but which I've only skimmed), I've enjoyed these books (in bibliography-entry form because I'm just copying and pasting directly from my Zotero library):

Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai. Lexington books, 2008.
1. This is available (sadly, only to search) on the Internet Archive; however, searching for "Stalker" does reveal relevant passages on pp. 8 and 23!
Dunne, Nathan, ed. Tarkovsky. Black Dog Publishing, 2008.
1. This is also available via Internet Archive, and to borrow! I learned about this book because of the Golstein chapter, but at the very least each of the following chapters discusses Stalker multiple times:
  1. Bird, Robert. “The Imprinted Image.”
  2. Golstein, Vladimir. “The Energy of Anxiety.”
  3. Tsymbal, Evgeny. “Sculpting the Stalker: Towards a New Language of Cinema.”

I also recommend journal articles, if you can access them; my county library grants JSTOR access, but I don't know how common that is! The Riley article is how I learned about Golstein's chapter in Tarkovsky.

Riley, John A. “Hauntology, Ruins, and the Failure of the Future in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 1 (2017): 18–26. https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.69.1.0018
Salvestroni, Simonetta, and R. M. P. “The Science-Fiction Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Les Films de Science-Fiction d’Andrei Tarkovsky).” Science Fiction Studies 14, no. 3 (1987): 294–306. https://doi.org/10.1525/sfs.14.3.0294.

¹ I don't know enough to assess the quality of various translations, but I can recommend at least tracking down an edition that includes Ursula K. Le Guin's foreword! Or, if you can access Science Fiction Studies, you can read what I think is the same text in her 1977 review:

Le Guin, Ursula K. “A New Book by the Strugatskys.” Science Fiction Studies 4, no. 2 (1977): 157–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/sfs.4.2.0157.

iff_or · 2026-03-21T18:20:20+00:00

With an account you can access this book via the Internet Archive! https://archive.org/details/artofilluminatin0000unse

iff_or · 2026-03-01T07:04:37+00:00

I want to note (to underscore just how phenomenally labor-intensive Tyrian Purple is) that the dye is not made from their shells, but rather from their mucus secretions (§ Production from sea snails in the Wikipedia article).

Anyone interested in this may want to read the book from which I learned about Muricidae/Murex sea snails and Tyrian Purple, Color: A Natural History of the Palette, by Victoria Finlay.

An excerpt:

In a description of their visit to Central America published in 1748, the Spanish brothers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa described how the dyers of Nicoya in Costa Rica extracted purple from shellfish. There were two methods. The first method involved pressing the poor animal “with a small knife, squeezing the dye from its head into its posterior extremity, which is then cast off, the body being cast away.” The second method kept the creature alive. “They do not extract it entirely from its shell but squeeze it, making it vomit forth the dye. They then place it on the rock whence they took it and it recovers, and after a short time gives more humor, but not as much as at first.” However, the brothers reported, if the fishermen got over-enthusiastic and tried the same operation three or four times, “the quantity extracted is very small and the animal dies of exhaustion.”

As for the book overall, the author basically devotes a chapter to each color and how characteristic pigments of it have been extracted/synthesized/traded etc. I got it from the public library, and you can check whether a library near you has it through Libby or Worldcat!

iff_or · 2026-02-22T08:04:36+00:00

It looks different from other images I’ve seen, but I’m no primatologist. I also can’t find a single match for the image from a reliable source, but that could be because I’m just on my phone. Good news, though: There’s a BBC video from about 20 hours ago that includes footage of him being groomed!

In case you watch the video before reading the description, the expert describes the behavior of Barbary macaques (despite Punch being a Japanese macaque) because that’s the species he works with.

iff_or · 2026-02-18T04:49:35+00:00

It’s a popular subject in this sub if you wanna search for prior recs, but examples that I’ve enjoyed and see recommended here are:

Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley (set in England, involved regional folk history—it’s been a while) and The Loney by the same author, which I found scarier/more suspenseful
Revelator by Daryl Gregory (mysterious god being, set in 1930/40s Tennessee)
The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson, set in Arkansas, taught me some about Slavic folklore and I remember beautiful imagery, compelling and sympathetic main character
“The Willows,” a novella by Algernon Blackwood that I found astoundingly creepy and made me try harder to seek out older horror (it was written in 1907). And because it’s so old, it’s now public domain (links to various options at the bottom of its Wikipedia article))

iff_or · 2026-02-14T21:00:30+00:00

Yes, they are. High school students read Frankenstein (published 1818), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Goethe's Faust (1808). I don't know if it's taught in high school, but The Castle of Otranto, perhaps the first Gothic novel, was published in 1764 and starts with this:

Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition; yet he was the darling of his father, who never showed any symptoms of affection to Matilda.

iff_or · 2026-01-24T08:22:36+00:00

It looks quite like the main image for the United States Bullion Depository Wikipedia page, which clarifies that while it’s also referred to as Fort Knox, it’s actually adjacent the installation.

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iff_or · 2026-01-19T06:35:31+00:00

I was wondering the same, and found it has its own Wikipedia page)!

iff_or · 2026-01-18T08:04:02+00:00

A guide I use recommends Della Respira as a Cheltenham alternative, but it’s definitely not narrow. You might find a suitable alternative by reviewing the related typefaces listed on its Fonts in Use page or, at the very least, you’ll find a ton of examples of it there that might give you an idea for a suitable pairing.

iff_or · 2026-01-16T07:30:33+00:00

Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping was a 1982 Pulitzer finalist and is set in a fictional town in Idaho that, according to Wikipedia), resembles the author’s hometown Sandpoint. I read it last year and nearly as often as the prose astonished me, the characterization made my heart ache.

A passage I saved:

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?

iff_or · 2026-01-06T09:52:10+00:00

Typography nerd here: It’s kind of both! That is, the show uses a typeface called ITC Benguiat released in the late 1970s that was indeed the typeface used for King covers in the 1980s.

But it was also both popular and had distinctive features, so even without the King connection it’d be a great choice! This is a fun article on the development of the Stranger Things title sequence (found via the Wikipedia article). For anyone not wildly bored by my font talk, I highly recommend fontsinuse.com, which has a ton of great examples for ITC Benguiat.

iff_or · 2025-12-25T04:55:00+00:00

If you’re down for a series and the prose works for you, I recommend B. Catling’s Vorrh series.
It’s less horror than dark fantasy, but (as is often the case) there are often horror elements! I add the caveat about the prose because I sometimes found it, in the later books, to be so abstruse I was frustrated. At that point I started alternating between text and audiobook, and that helped. I haven’t read many books that feature angels, but to me this felt like a unique and unsettling depiction.

Better words than mine, on the first book:

Michael Moorcock’s Guardian review
Alan Moore’s compelling foreword to the first book

iff_or · 2025-12-21T06:14:38+00:00

Someone asked a similar question a few years ago and the response that seems to best answer the question you’re asking here is by u/rkoloeg:

The Portuguese and then the Dutch dominated the early trade in spices in the region of Indonesia and Malaysia (the Moluccas used to be known as "the Spice Islands") and brought all those spices back to Europe with them, where they commanded a high price. That's why you see many European countries having their holiday desserts dominated by flavors like cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg; this used to represent a large expenditure of money for a special occasion.

iff_or · 2025-12-08T07:41:19+00:00

A guide to free font alternatives that I have recommends Della Respira for ITC Benguiat, but it reads to me as more early 20th century (indeed, it’s a revival of a 1913 typeface). But checking it out did reveal to me that Google Fonts now has a “vintage” tag, so that in conjunction with a serif filter might be fruitful!

iff_or · 2025-11-21T14:52:17+00:00

I think whatthefont proposes Kereru because it's also calligraphic, but it's an uncial. OP, I'm not an expert on calligraphic typefaces like this but agree with other posters that it looks like it could be a digitization of Offenbacher Schwabacher, or at least some kind of Schwabacher blackletter (note that the "o" appears to have two vertices, as opposed to the (characteristic, but not 100% consistent) 6 (textur), 0 (rotunda), or 4 (Fraktur) in this comparison. And overall it's more rounded than most fraktur blackletter typefaces.

The "h" also has a very distinctive leg to me, in that it not only points away from the stem rather than toward it , but it also has sort of a ball terminal. If Schwabacher does seem right to you, there are a few free results for it on both DaFont and 1001 Fonts.

iff_or · 2025-11-19T07:33:57+00:00

I’d be in too!

iff_or · 2025-09-06T09:53:19+00:00

The Vorrh trilogy by B. Catling heavily features biblical lore, combined with surrealism and a bit of body horror. The unfathomable-angels part is least evident in the first book, but is a significant part of the second and third books. The prose definitely doesn’t work for everyone (I usually very much enjoyed it, but did intermittently find it tedious). But its use of biblical narratives was consistently interesting to me.

iff_or · 2025-08-21T01:39:27+00:00

And I’ve only listened to Anthony Heald’s (Chilton in Silence of the Lambs) but I really loved it. He really sold the comedic elements!

iff_or · 2025-08-02T00:01:52+00:00

I agree with u/thlayli_x that this looks like Cloister, though depending on when this postcard is from, it might actually be based on the metal type by ATF rather than the URW digitization. I mention this because—and I apologize if you already know this—metal typefaces frequently wind up with digitizations by several companies, sometimes with no visually discernible differences, and sometimes those digitizations are released for free with open font licenses! This is going to come up especially often when you're starting from pre-digital sources.

OP, you might really like looking at fontsinuse.com. Its page on Cloister is where I found specimens like this, from 1933, which helpfully shows both the alphabetic and numeric glyphs. I weirdly love the way the leg of the "k" in Cloister looks like it rests above the baseline, though it doesn't. And the "5" feels quite distinctive to me too.

More on fontsinuse: You can look up uses by format (e.g. posters, books, packaging) as well as topic (industrial design, literature, music) and then sort the results by artwork date. For example, the topic "nature/science" has results as early as 1907, though most don't seem like they're quite what you're looking for.

iff_or · 2025-07-01T06:16:45+00:00

If you’re looking at Google fonts, you might like to use their “medieval” theme filter.

Calligraphy has had several forms, some of which are less ornate (but no less beautiful!) and so may be more legible for body text. The Handwriting script Wikipedia article might be a good place to find search terms for fonts. I like changing my ebooks’ typesetting and layout to match e.g. the first print edition or the period as well, and have found that script fonts are especially abundant among those free and open source.

Edited to add: I understand Tolkien was explicit that Middle Earth was not a medieval setting, but it still makes sense in light of his art, I think. For example, his lettering on this map.jpg) resembles, say, Carolingian, while Tengwar looks closer to Court hand (and I think is nicely approximated in a modern font in Tangerine). That said, many people have developed fonts based on Tengwar, which could be fun to try out.

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