On Looking: Eleven Walks With Eyes Part 2

Back on the streets, we were honked at for jaywalking and nearly swiped by a bus. I felt for a moment that we had left the geology behind us, but I was quickly disabused of this notion. A few buildings in from the avenue, we reached a knee-high retaining wall in front of a row house: a short, unlovely white wall separating the sidewalk from the building's trash storage. h.o.r.enstein stopped, to my surprise. Apart from a few bright yellow leaves on its surface, the wall was not something to attract me: it looked filthy. Not to h.o.r.enstein: to him it looked like gold.

"Limestone. This is a limestone from Indiana. Right here, these are worm burrows."

He fingered a long squiggle on the surface of the wall. It did look like a place a worm had been trapped. But-in the rock?

In the rock. "This rock was once loose stuff"-sediment-"on the sea floor-and you have sea worms going through it and leaving their trails." When the rock was soft sediment, ancient marine worms burrowed through it, eating their way along. The worm-shaped traces h.o.r.enstein was pointing out were their paths, chemically changed from pa.s.sing through the worm's digestive system and fossilized after the worm moved on. On the very next building down the street, he found some of the sea worms' old pals: "Oh, and here's a crinoid! And that's a bryozoan. And that's actually a pelecypod right there."

These were not familiar animal characters to me, but as I started to pa.r.s.e the variegated surface for signs of past life, h.o.r.enstein explained who we were seeing. Limestone, a popular building material, is full of the sh.e.l.ls, remains, and other traces of ancient animals. In fact it mostly is these fossils and fragments. Like schist, it formed in the Geologically-Long-Ago era, on the floor of the oceans-and this ocean was where the Midwestern United States is now. The movement of ocean waters broke up the sh.e.l.ls of the small invertebrate animals-snails, scallops, other tiny organisms. Crinoids were little creatures with stems of repeated discs, stacked like wafers. Bryozoans were sedentary animals, shaped like fans, much like coral. Pelecypods, scallopy things, left a trace of the familiar seash.e.l.l-by-the-seash.o.r.e.

The crinoid wafers looked like small coins with Os in their center, ancient subway tokens for the sea. Suddenly I saw them everywhere. The worm traces read like ancient graffiti down the length of the building. Taking this in, my view of the street was entirely changed: no longer was it pa.s.sive rock; it was a sea graveyard. I was nearly speechless.

"That's a surprising thing to see on this retaining wall, three-hundred-million-year-old worm tracks," I managed, as though h.o.r.enstein could make this fact logical and ordinary.

He did not attempt a response. Instead, he indicated for me to follow him. As we continued down the block, h.o.r.enstein was constantly talking. If you think of the city as geology unearthed, it is nonstop: he pointed out features of the sidewalks and streets; walls, roofs, and stairs; atriums, cornices, and decorative rosettes. All were stones; all were known to him. Just this one block, a random sample of any block in this city or any city, contained the history of geology across eras and locales. But it began to look to me like a mash-up history written by lunatics, where red granite from Missouri sat next to stone from Knoxville, Tennessee, and immigrant limestone from France rested alongside the Midwesterners, both politely quiet on the other's accent. Between these sightings were a half dozen of the city's famous brownstones-actually sandstone, I learned, from two hundred million years ago. Underfoot, concrete, made of heated limestone, cement, and pebbles, nudged slabs of quarried granite from Maine and bluestone from Vermont.

We stopped at the bluestone. "It's from Proctor, Vermont," he specified. "It shows a very interesting thing, which we never think about. You see the feathers?"

I laughed. Clearly a trick question.

Wrong. "See right here? See these lines radiating out? . . . That is where the stone mason hit the stone to split it."

The stone has multiple stories to tell us, for it has had multiple lives. Every stone has a parent-for the limestone, it is the creatures of the sea-and even in this latest, most quiet phase of its last hundred million years, it has seen some things. Quarries, created to pull stone out of the earth by the tonful, each have distinctive characters, and the people who know stones come to know the quarries from which they have been sourced. Different techniques of harvesting the rock, splitting the rock into workable sizes, and treating the rock result in characteristic pocks and colors. One method of splitting a rock like bluestone into manageable slabs is to use a "plug" and "feathers"-just a rod and flanking s.h.i.+ms, which, when hit into the stone at even intervals, causes the stone to split naturally in two. The lines of the split can be seen (h.o.r.enstein called both the tool and the mark it left by the same name), and sometimes even the round hole that housed the plug is clearly visible.

The bluestone's neighbor was a brownstone building whose first-story stone face was textured with pocks. These were the marks of the tools of the stone mason: hammers and chisels used not just to break apart the stone but to decorate it. Two blocks of stone adjacent to each other might have very different pocking, because they were done by different hands.

By the time we reached the end of the block an hour later, I was almost afraid to look around me. This vision of the city as vertical geology had made me dizzy. I could no longer see, and dismiss, a city block as simply a row of uniform buildings neatly snuggled together between avenues. Now the block and its contents appeared to me more as a jumble of geological time and place. Even a single building on West Seventy-sixth Street became a wildly anachronistic historical painting, on examination: Italian marble stood proudly aside 330-million-year-old Indiana limestone, atop 365-million-year-old bluestone from the Catskills and next to boulders of Manhattan schist, some 380 million years old and revealed by retreating glaciers only twelve thousand years ago.

h.o.r.enstein smiled in his gentle way. "There is so much to entertain you, you know." He had bestowed on me the ability to be entertained by rocks-not a trivial gift. A street full of rocks, made buildings, becomes a whirlwind tour through eons. I now saw h.o.r.enstein, too, changed by his own expertise. He can never walk down a block and not see its geology. We all have our own chesslike expertise in our heads, the place we know impossibly well, the images with which we are intimately familiar, the fine motor skill or athletic grace we can recognize in other people. h.o.r.enstein's brain, I thought, is full of rocks, arranged on a chessboard of his own reckoning. He shook my hand, turned away, and walked back to the museum, surrounded by his friends.

1 A remarkable example of the natural paving of the land is visible in Northern Ireland, at a place called Clochn na bhFmharach, where a volcanic eruption left tens of thousands of columns of basalt standing like letterpress type well packed in its shelving.

2 This is understating things. The fetid seeds, innocuous-looking yellow cherries, fall seasonally and are mashed underfoot. The butyric acid in their skin makes them, smashed, single-handedly responsible for scores of people stopping and visually investigating that odor coming from the bottom of their shoes. The female tree is the responsible party; the male simply turns delightfully yellow in fall and rains its fan-shaped leaves on merry fall-color-seekers.

3 Well, not all of us. A disorder called prosopagnosia manifests in the inability to recognize faces at all-sometimes even, incredibly and embarra.s.singly, the faces of one's parents, children, or spouse. Oliver Sacks wrote about the strangeness and severity of this condition in one of his early books of essays. The book's t.i.tle, which has almost come to stand in for the singular Sacksian approach, alludes to an event that occurred to a sufferer of face-blindness: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In a very strange subsequent development, Sacks has since revealed himself to be prosopagnosic, a condition he was not himself aware of for many years before writing that book in the 1980s. I cannot do justice to his reflections on his condition in a footnote (though many of his most surprising revelations appear in his own footnotes).

4 This story of the dip in the city's skyline, long told by geologists and retold by John McPhee, was recently called into question by a trio of economists who found, perhaps unsurprisingly, economic forces more explanatory of the city's building patterns. They also found the bedrock less invariant than previously described. Perhaps, as is often the case, both stories have some truth.

"To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees."

(Paul Valery).

Minding Our Qs.

"Forgettable, indistinguishable signs topped the stores, advertising pizza and cleaners."

Paul Shaw shuddered. We were standing in front of an architectural gallery's storefront and facing the quite ordinary-looking, quite benign sign that reported the store's name, mailing address, web address, and opening hours. I read the text. Shaw read not only the letters, but the lettering. "Helvetica: the usual thing you'd expect"-that is, the kind of typeface architects like to use-"followed by avant-garde Gothic with italic. Eww." Shaw crinkled his forehead. "And then Adobe Garamond, italic. . . and then with bad s.p.a.cing. . . ." He trailed off, sounding bemused.

Shaw is afflicted with the disorder of knowing too much-in this case, about the design of letters. It is a disorder that makes one, as Shaw is, a formidable typographer. He is a professional letterhead. Shaw creates lettering-custom lettering and logos, whole typefaces-and studies it, as a writer and on foot. He leads an elaborate, meandering tour through Italy for a small group as keen on contemporary Roman graffito as on medieval and ancient inscriptions. In New York, he has taught calligraphy and typography at Parson's School of Design for over two decades and has stalked Helvetica (and the various non-Helveticas) in the subway system. This malady, this literaphilia, makes one seek, and see, letters. In a city, letters are everywhere.

One trouble with being human-with the human condition-is that, as with many conditions, you cannot turn it off. Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world. And our world is a linguistic one, fas.h.i.+oned in and then described with language.

Early in life, an infant will make certain noises that have special resonance to parents. The varieties of cries, from fussy to outraged, are matched by the round warm coos of satisfaction. The infant vacillates between being a catastrophist and a purring kitten. Soon, though, nearly regardless of what his parents do, as long as they talk around him, that infant will start making different sounds. These hums, burbles, and yammers will be the sounds that make up the language or languages he hears floating above his head. His young brain magically distinguishes the parents' language from the hums, roars, and crashes of nonlanguage sounds in the world.

For the first five years of life, it is said, children learn approximately one word every two hours they are awake. This fact is intended to impress, and it does. From an adult's vantage, the prodigiousness of the infant mind is enviable (even though we have all had that mind). Most of us struggle to remember that new, curious word we read just this morning in the newspaper. In theory, I would like my brain to sponge up words like an infant's does, but in reality, I also find the child's progress terrifying. Every hour, children are losing more and more ability to think without language-and without the cultural knowledge that language pa.s.ses along. Every hour, children are less able to not notice words. And to me, the lack of language is what is enviable.

Don't get me wrong: I am appreciative of the language that allows me to write that I am appreciative of language. I love, covet, and collect words-silly words and finely formed words and words I'll never use but just feel glad to know. My husband and I own hundreds of dictionaries, whose main roles in our lives are first, to wait uncomplaining until they are thumbed through by us, and second, to then offer up such masterpieces of grace and charm as omphalos, amanuensis, and picklesome.

Few of these words, though, will I encounter in an ordinary day. By contrast, every day, when walking in a city, driving along a highway, or existing anyplace but deep wilderness, we are beset by dull, tedious words. Signs and storefronts and billboards and computer screens barrage us with text that we, with our language-besotted minds, cannot help but read. As I write this, I hesitantly peek out my office window, and, without my willing it, my eyes track quickly and inevitably to the text on the side of a taxi: NYC TAXI, it reads. $2.50 INITIAL FARE. On its roof, an advertising billboard commands, BE STUPID. As the taxi pa.s.ses, a stenciled POST NO BILLS is discernible on the scaffolding hulking over the sidewalk. Words are the ample cleavage of the urban environment: impossible not to look at.

Worse still, every city is dense with surfaces, and at some point in human history someone discovered that surfaces are great places to put words and other symbols. Ancient Egypt slaveowners plastered walls with papyrus posters offering a reward for the return of runaway va.s.sals. Greek and Roman merchants placed symbolic signs-a wooden shoe; a stone soup pot-above the doorways of their shops. And the ruins of Pompeii, which in its ashen burial preserved a day in the life of AD 76, has walls covered with notices and inscriptions for real estate ("To rent from the first day of next July, shops with floors over them, fine upper chambers . . ."), advertising gladiatorial games, and promoting electoral candidates (or opposing them: "The whole company of late risers favor [the election of] Vatia")-as well as plain old graffiti and personal messaging: "Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze sweetly" is still inscribed on one wall, at least two millennia after Victoria stopped sneezing for good.

Today we rarely encounter a public surface completely without words. In New York City, signs identifying shops have migrated from the shop face and door onto awnings, banners, and placards thrust into the line of vision of a pa.s.sing pedestrian. Should you hope to escape the linguistic attack by ducking into the subway, you will be sorely disappointed. The support columns, stair risers, and banisters in the subway system are plastered with advertis.e.m.e.nts, excited text and airbrushed photos vacantly hollering as you weave through the crowds. Before freestanding billboards came into urban s.p.a.ces, a building's windowless wall might be painted with an ad. The faded remnants of the paint still peek out from between more recent developments. (The products advertised, the lozenges and carriages of our grandparents' time, are usually as faded as the paint.) In much of New York City, the mere presence of a stretch of wall without words on it is all the prompt a graffitist needs to spray-paint some onto it. Rarely are they wis.h.i.+ng Victoria sweet sneezes.

So I had no concern, on heading downtown to meet Paul Shaw, that we would not see any letters. Still, I wondered, is there any other way to see these words than as linguistic? En route, I gaped at the language that tracked me as I walked down my block, onto a bus, and through a pocket park between avenues. Everything was lettered. Officially, "lettering" describes letters specially "drawn, carved, cut, torn," or otherwise a.s.sembled for the purpose of being displayed. More recently, the words type and font have become lay synonyms for lettering, although you can cause eye-rolling or lip-pursing in a typophile if you use them that way.1 What I was seeing were mostly just letters. I saw letters on street signs and commercial signs; on flyers, telephone booths, and lampposts; as building names; on T-s.h.i.+rts and knapsacks with logos, affiliations, and statements of purpose; on trucks, declaring their master's and their maker's name. Underfoot, the text on the manhole cover (Con Ed, NYC) and discarded potato chip bag (Lay's, 150 calories) lay alongside a mouse-sized flag announcing the application of mouse poison to this area. I waited at a bus-stop shelter with the stop name and bus line printed on it, which lettering was overpowered by an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a television show, which itself was partially covered by a flyer ("room to rent . . . from July 1st . . .") and marred by a graffitied "DOOR" etched into the plastic wall of the shelter. The sides of trash bins say things now. The heels of sneakers. Even my toddler son noted that the holey ventilation grate on the business end of window air conditioners is really just a concatenation of letter Os. Instructions, directions, labels, a.s.sertions, names, descriptions, suggestions, and commands abound.

Perhaps I should have challenged Shaw not to see letters. But I was walking with him not to find more letters but to see them in a different light. Shaw is in love with letters-with finding them, making them, and, as though they were rare shy marsupials seen only at night, "investigating their habitats." This love may come from some intrinsic Shawness, but it also comes from being a designer and researcher of letters for so long. To me, the TAXI sign says, well, "taxi." To a typographer, it says disaster. When the current version of taxicab signage first appeared, there was a low murmur of outcry among those interested in lettering. Among other missteps noted, the NYC and TAXI are set in two separate typefaces, the kerning (s.p.a.cing) on the former is so tight as to make the letters almost illegible, and the word TAXI, which features a circle around the contrast-colored T, really reads "T-Axi." There was an art-a lack of art-in those letters. There was a political or personal choice, an anachronism, a misapplication of type font to signage, a readability study gone awry. There was a history in the letters, and Shaw knew it.2 We met on a sunless day in February. As I approached him, grinning and waving, Shaw's shoulders slumped and his hands dove into his pockets. His hair was dramatically unkempt. Although he glanced at me in greeting, his eyes were scouring the surfaces around us: the walls, the fire escapes, the streets, the lampposts and telephone boxes. He was, as always, looking for letters. Shaw himself was linguistically neutral: his jacket and bag had no visible letters on them.

We had decided to walk down a series of blocks across town from where we both lived, down streets unknown to us. Yet I sensed that these streets already had familiar elements to Shaw. Just as architectural styles identify a city, so too is a city recognizable by the type of lettering that predominates. Putting aside the rash of newer, computer-font signs now topping identical cell-phone stores and delis, the lettering that exists and remains on buildings represents when a city was built, how it has evolved, and whether that evolution involved destruction or restoration. New York City's style is hodgepodge, but with a distinctive early-twentieth-century tw.a.n.g. The regularity of Art Deco and Art Moderne lettering tells us that the 1920s and '30s saw a lot of construction in the city-construction of a scale and of a quality that has largely survived. Sans-serif Gothic from the late nineteenth century also appears around town, in raised stone letters on the face of a building, for instance. Like building styles, lettering goes through fads, trends: what looks modern now will look antiquated soon enough; what is brash may soon be ordinary.

The block on which we began was chock-full of letters. I tended to see them as words, though, not just strings of letters: I read them. GALLERY HOURS, AUTO SERVICE, WHOLESALE LIGHTING, 24-HOUR DRIVEWAY, the always-perplexing HOT DOGS PIZZA combination. We stood in front of a gallery named "Storefront for Art & Architecture." It has a locally famous facade, with irregularly shaped wall panels that pivot on hinges opening over the sidewalk. Exhibits bleed out into pedestrian s.p.a.ce, and pa.s.sersby are swept into the art merely by the act of choosing to walk on the north side of the street. Less famous is the lengthy signage spelling out the gallery's name, which runs along the forty or so feet of storefront. Standing directly in front of it, Shaw noted that the lettering appeared unnaturally broad and tightly squeezed between two horizontal planes. The legs of the As and Rs were widely splayed; the ampersand had become a squat croissant. Then he realized, they were not meant to be read by us. At least, not by us standing where we were. We took five steps backward toward the street corner: yes, that was more like it. The letters were designed to be read in approach: they were stretched and distorted so that from an angled approach, they all looked to be the same size. From this vantage, the gallery name was perfectly legible.

As I loitered, admiring the gallery's way of luring people closer, I mumbled something to Shaw. But Shaw was gone. Indeed, Shaw was continually going missing from my side, pursuing some new letter, as we walked together. He darted to the curb to take in a second-story shop sign from a proper distance; he stopped cold to add to his collection of photos of NO PARKING signs, an unglamorous but very common sign in this city of more-cars-than-parking-spots.

"I look at everything," he said in response to my query about whether he had a preference for a kind of lettering-on a sign or on the ground, deliberate or inadvertent. "When I do walking tours, I forget to look where I'm going." With all the signs, a person could get lost.

We pa.s.sed a yellow NO PARKING sign painted on a pull-down garage door. The door was topped by red lettering for an auto-service shop: PARK IN AUTO SERVICE. To the side, there were more letters, climbing up the building: small printed signs on the sides of fire escapes at each floor. All were unlovely to my eyes: a verbal mess, part of the visual cacophony of the city. But Shaw stopped to admire them, to look at them directly.

"It's from the forties," he said. It took me a minute to realize he was talking about the awkward auto-service sign. I looked. The letters were jaunty, in the way that uneven, improperly s.p.a.ced lettering can be, like a child's handwriting. It looked like a bit of a mess to me. But not to Shaw. If we looked around us, most of the shop signs were computer-printed vinyl signs, undistinguished and undistinguishable from one another. Given the ubiquity of the generic shop sign these days, this odd sign became more interesting. "It's hard to find anything that's unique. And somebody had to cut these letters out of wood or something." He paused, finally conceding, "They're all strange."

Their strangeness became more clear as we peered at it. "The U" [in AUTO] "appears backwards." Now that he said it, I could see it: the right leg was heavier, thicker, than the left leg. I realized that I knew-without explicitly knowing it-that the thicker leg of a letter U is usually the leading leg. I impulsively enlarge and embolden the font I am typing in, Garamond. Its left leg is subtly thicker. Cambria, too. Times. Palatino. One of Shaw's creations, Stockholm. They all wear an asymmetry that we know about but have never seen.

"The V"-in SERVICE-"is backwards, too," Shaw continued. "The Rs are very high waisted."

He was on a roll. The diagnoses came fast and furious now. "The E is not high, but the A of course can't be. The A has to be lower. The N has a serif in the lower right, which you often don't find, but in this particular, I won't call it style, but with these sort of triangular serifs, that is one place that you do find serifs. It seems to be a piece of wood, but it could be cut out of metal, so . . . they probably were using some kind of blowtorch. And that might explain why the kerns are a little bit different. . . . And the S is in two pieces: it has very nice curves."

Shaw's ability to find interest in this splendidly dull, unattractive sign was humbling. I was not only dismissive of the sign, I had a dismissive response built in to my perceptual system, to allow me to avoid even seeing this kind of sign to begin with. Now that I looked at it, I still did not find it attractive. But it had its own character, animated by Shaw's attention. I felt pleased for the sign that it stood boldly individualistic among boring vinyl-awning lettering. Good for you, Auto Service!

This is not to say that Shaw was not judgmental. As we proceeded, I was treated to his verdict on various letters on our route. This verdict was usually rendered as a version of "That's awful!" loitering on the awww to emphasize the emotion behind that a.s.sessment: it hurt, it was so awful. As I learned, the ways that lettering awfulness can happen are various. In one case, a sign's typeface looked to have been stretched on the computer, distorting the letters; in another, the type had been unnaturally squeezed, making the letters plainly uncomfortable. Here, a random final letter was made larger, for no reason (the awfulness of arbitrariness); there, it was the wrong typeface for the building (the awfulness of unsuitability). Another was awful for being mechanically cut, not hand cut. A further awfulness used two versions of a letter form in the same word. We saw, of all things, a shop that makes and sells signs. Its sign was particularly awful.

Shaw looked despondent. This despondency lasted approximately three seconds.

"Look at that!"

I looked. If you are interested in letters, there is a lot of awful about, but there is always something else to see. Shaw was facing a shop whose sign read "PACIFIC AQUARIUM & PET." It was what I, with my non-professional sign vision, would have called "an ordinary sign." Red lettering attached to a long stretch of yellow plastic announced what was probably a desultory array of fishbowls and small birds inside. The sign did not tell us much else. If pressed, I could probably have said that the sign was not new: its style seemed dated, and the whole thing looked to have been battered by weather. My interest was waning, but Shaw's was percolating.

"It's a Q!"

The lettering was all in capital letters. I followed his gaze to the Q of AQUARIUM. There was something different about it. My eyes were slowly adjusting to seeing letters in this light: it was plainly not as Qy as Qs usually are. We stared up at it, our Adam's apples flas.h.i.+ng the pa.s.sersby, who followed our gaze and looked back at us for the explanation not forthcoming. Still, it took me a surprisingly long time to see what Shaw had presumably seen immediately. Then I saw it: "The Q has an internal limb," I exclaimed happily. The flourish of a leg that makes an O a Q was turned inside, instead of pointing out. It was an inverted belly b.u.t.ton.

Shaw smiled approvingly. As if in explanation for his grin, he elaborated: "What looks like an ordinary sign from the past, is not. That Q is perfect for it." It was a Q he had never seen before.

Was it beautiful? I like Qs as much as the next person, but I had not been particularly moved by this one. Still, its eccentricity plainly animated an otherwise unremarkable sign. The Q was probably specially designed so its tail did not extend into the phone number sitting below it. I began thinking about Qs and the problems that they might present.

It was hardly only Qs, though. Over an hour's walk, we encountered lots of problems, and Shaw was happy to enumerate them.

Of a Park's Department sign: "Well, lettering on brick is a problem. . . ."

Of a sign that sat away from the wall: "Well, it's made worse from the depth-there's the shadow problem. . . ."

Lettering around a curve: "It's hard to make letters with straight serifs going around a curve and it's worse if you don't s.p.a.ce them out further," which they had not.

The "horrible gap" created in the s.p.a.ce between a T and an h: like This and That, which can be partially solved by a ligature: Thusly.

Problem letter combinations: "the double t in settlement. Always a very tough thing . . ."

". . . And the problems with the Rs."

The problem with the Rs?

The more we looked, the more problems with letters we found. Any time I felt my gut twist on seeing a sign, I could just turn to Shaw with a plaintive Why so bad? look, and he would diagnose the malady. I realized that I had been blithely walking by undiagnosed lettering disasters my whole life-fairly like the hidden psychological frailties of pa.s.sing strangers, I supposed.

Shaw's whole perception-his ability to see the art of the letters, and to be moved by the awful or glorious-is evidence of an element of his own psychology. We all have an aesthetic, even emotional reaction to particular scenes or objects we see. Some researchers theorize that we have an innate hunger to pursue visual stimuli that give us pleasure. When we sate that hunger, a flood of the brain's natural opioids is released. What, exactly, gives us pleasure? Things rich with information, packed tight with perceptual pudding that calls forth the knowledge we have and a.s.sociations we have made with similar experiences in the past. In this way, Shaw's expertise allows him to get a kind of natural high from seeing a beautiful letter.

Over the course of our walk, it was cold enough that my fingers lost their normal flow of blood and the batteries in my tape recorder quietly stopped generating a charge. Shaw, by contrast, seemed to get more energy as we went. As he explained what it was that I did not see, his eyebrows were working, raising and lowering in emphasis, his blinks fast and spirited. At times it seemed as though he was talking to the letters themselves, as though they were animate, living creatures. His language about letters certainly evoked a kind of humanity.

An O, squished between an S and N, looked "uncomfortable." Another letter was "jaunty." In prose and speech, Shaw appropriated the language of the human body to highlight anything unusual about the characters he found: an ampersand was "pregnant"; an R "long-legged" ; and an S "high-waisted." On the web, lettering and typography discussion boards sprinkle animistic characterizations among the professional jargon: an S "is a bit depressed," another is "complacent"; an R "curtsies," a G is "tipsy" , a J "suicidal"; one letter design "needs more humanisticness." There is a lot of humanisticness to borrow, in fact. As Shaw and I pa.s.sed by people on the sidewalks, I started mentally reckoning which of their features I could use to describe the letters we were seeing. I pictured a "squinty," small-holed B; a "large-nosed" P wearing a heavy top; a "short-necked" f with its crossbar squished at its top.

Most of the letters we saw on our walk were plainly visible, if not usually so closely examined. But it has become the sport of some city buffs to find letters that are mostly invisible: ghost signs. These signs have been intentionally removed, painted over, replaced, or neglected to the point of nearly-but not quite-disappearing altogether. Discovery of one is pleasurable in the way that finding that a cas.h.i.+er has handed you an old Indian-head nickel is pleasurable. I keep these nickels, little totems of the past. And I mentally collect ghost signs, nodding up at them from the street as I walk by. When new construction causes the demolition of an old, tall building, I scan the sides of the adjacent buildings now freshly exposed for evidence of dormant advertising on their broad, windowless walls. To find the occasional nickel, to spy large painted capital letters heralding CORRUGATED BOXES * BOUGHT AND SOLD on a building's flank, makes me feel that if only my eyes were really open all the time, I would see these glimpses of the past everywhere.

On our walk we came across a double-ghost: at least two ghost signs overlapping. A real estate concern and an ad agency both had named telephone exchanges-Ca.n.a.l 61212 and Orchard 4-1209-indicating that they dated to the mid-1900s. The signs were romantic and yet horribly ordinary. It is hard to believe that today's signs may be tomorrow's beloved ghosts, but sure as my 1970's polyester tritone s.h.i.+rt and my plebeian 1964 Volvo are now "cla.s.sics," it will likely be so. For Shaw, the ghost signs were more informative than nostalgic. While you might expect an architectural historian to be able to date a building by its window-frame style or the kind of brick used, Shaw was just as good an architectural detective, using only the evidence from the lettering.

And indeed, a half hour into our walk, we came across a strange architectural dig of a building. Regal but squat, wider than it was tall, it featured a limestone facade (crinoid rich, I now suspected, after walking with Sidney h.o.r.enstein) and a central, arching display window. Were there car showrooms along the street, I would have expected they would look something like this building. Shaw went straight into letter-a.s.sessment mode.

"This is really cool."

Then he slipped into letter-detective mode. What caught his attention first was a delicate and colorful stained-gla.s.s sign, miraculously intact, protected by a plastic cover. For a big building, it was a very small building sign. We barely looked at what it said; instead, Shaw immediately identified its style: "That is Art Nouveau all the way: all the curves. The B, the E, the R, the Y, and the way everything fits together."

Each letter had enormous character. An A swaggered; the B had a great belly; the R, a proud chest; O was apple shaped. They were golden colored and segmented, backed by a wash of sea-green gla.s.s. It was unlike any other public sign I had seen in the city.

Art Nouveau is a late-nineteenth-century style, and rare in this city: Shaw thought this was a replica. He stood on his tiptoes to try to get a closer look and found a T-M embossed on the ironwork. Stepping back from the building, we saw TREE-MARK SHOES engraved into the stone at the top of the building facade-"copying cla.s.sical Rome," he said, indicating dots carved between each word. Between all of these clues, he guessed the building's date: early twentieth century with a late-twentieth-century revision.

At its edge was a 6, the building's numbered address. I looked wordlessly at Shaw, who responded: "That's tacked on . . . from a hardware store."

Make that . . . twentieth-century revision with a twenty-first-century hardware-store number.

A simple set of signs, unseen by even those who look at them, is a story of the past. To complete the story, I consulted newspaper archives and city guides. I found that 6-8 Delancey Street was constructed in its current form, first housing a theater and then a retail shoe shop ("shoes for abnormal feet," their ads proclaimed), in 1929. Before that, it held residences, was the scene of a locally famous robbery implicating some New York City detectives, and then wound up as the euphemistic "disorderly house."

It was now a rock club.3 Give or take a decade or two, Shaw's detectiving got us a fair biography of the building. There was nothing about the criminality of the police, of course. But it was lettering that led me there.

Three hours of walking with Shaw later, I felt relieved, for the moment, of my compulsion to read what was readable, to pa.r.s.e text when I saw it. Surprisingly, this relief came not from avoiding text, but from seeking it out-only to zoom in on the details held within. It was a vision that let me miss the forest and see the trees. Rather than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguistic part) rested; the shape-identifying part hummed with activity.

Shaw and I parted ways under a beautiful neon sign, and I doubled back to the spot where we began our walk. It looked much the same. I felt a letdown that my quick immersion in lettering did not enable me, suddenly, to recognize the typeface on the street sign, or identify what was wrong with the s.p.a.cing of the lettering glaring at me from an awning.

I glanced down from the architectural storefront's name to the paneled wall. It was winter; the panels were closed, quiet. But then I saw something: letters. Each of the panels, far from being a random shape, was cut in the shape of a clumsy, enormous, serifless letter, as by a giant with a blunt X-Acto knife. I had caught Shaw's disease, I realized, I saw letters.

As a college student, long ago, with a new Macintosh computer, the type whose screen was dwarfed by its computer case housing, I became a Tetris player. Do you know the game? If you do, I have just induced a nostalgic bubble to pop in your brain. Perhaps only one or two computer games came pre-loaded on the Mac, and this one had an addictive quality. Four simple shapes floated down from the top of the screen, and all one had to do was rotate them and send them scurrying to the left or right in an attempt to fill all the bins at the bottom of the screen before the shape landed, clumsily, on its edge. Tetris players know what happens after hours of playing this game. Objects in the real world all turn into variations on these shapes. Entering the library, I saw the jagged pieces that needed to be rotated vertically and set onto a matching shape. I felt the satisfaction of L-shaped pieces when looking at intricate floor tiling patterns. A long rectangular restroom sign placed above a square handicapped sign made me thoroughly uncomfortable.

This is a real perceptual phenomenon, not just limited to video-game enthusiasts. The thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next. In conscribing my percepts to that computer screen for hours on end, I began heightening my ability to spot just those shapes that danced across it. Psychology research studying subjects playing Tetris (because psychology research can get away with studying anything, it seems) for seven hours over three days reified this "Tetris Effect." The researchers kept the subjects in the lab overnight and woke them up when their brain waves indicated they were entering hypnagogic sleep, unofficially known as "just dropping off to sleep." All of the subjects who did not poke or punch the nasty researchers, but who reported that they had been dreaming, were dreaming of falling Tetris pieces. Even amnesic subjects, who had no recollection of playing the game during the day, reported dreaming of the shapes: they could not explicitly remember what they had been doing, but their dreams told them.

A walk with Shaw left me with a Letter Effect. Now that I saw the storefront panels as letters, I couldn't not see them. Together, they clearly spelled out a nonsense word, heavy in Ps, Qs, and Us. Walking back to the subway, I glanced down at my feet as I crossed the street. LOOK was painted on the sidewalk where I stood. I will-but I feel sure that now, my vision changed, the letters will find me.

1 Font is meant to refer to the set or a.s.sortment of letters you are using when you type; the typeface is the style of that font.

2 The typographers' complaints must have reached the taxi powers-that-be, for at press time, a new logo began appearing on taxi doors: simply the T, unbothered by any further letters. One might think that a single letter would be unproblematic, design-wise, but if so, one has not met Shaw.

3 The Bowery Ballroom.

"The world is full of obvious things which n.o.body by any chance ever observes."

(Sherlock Holmes).