[Published in the Atlanta Macintosh User Group newsletter.]

MY MOTHER

THE MAC

Of family, friends

and their Macs

by Jeb Cashin

My mother has been a calligraphist for many years. She is so devoted to the profession that her license plate reads “CALLIG.” I often worry that it calls to mind Caligula more quickly than Calligraphy.

In 1987, Mom bought a Macintosh. This was an extraordinary event in the world of computing. (But typical in the world of Macintosh.) Mom had never touched a computer in her life. Within a few months she was publishing the newsletter for the local calligraphy group, Friends of the Alphabet. Guy Kawasaki could have been no more proud than I.

Of course, it was very controversial. Postscript fonts are the unworthy enemy to the artisans of hand-lettering… in a war fought with mouse pitted against pen, with ink pitted against toner. The Friends of the Alphabet scoffed at the mathematical precision of scalable fonts.

Such precision leaves no room for subtle fluctuations in style or mood.

So the postscript wizards returned fire with kerning, bending, and even random bits of built-in imperfection. Fonts! Fonts! Hundreds of fonts! The hoarders of type rejoiced.

Mom ignored the war, and cranked out one of the finest calligraphic newsletters in the country. You don’t hand-letter a thousand word newsletter with a two-day deadline.

The simple Times or Helvetica text was graced with grand hand-lettered headlines. Articles were often introduced with an elaborate first letter, reminiscent of those that would begin some monk of old’s calligraphied passage of scripture.

In her own way, Mom brought together the powers of wizards and artists.

Epilogue: Within a year of Mom’s Mac purchase, she was elected president of The Friends of the Alphabet.

Epilogue II: In his 2005 commencement speech to Stanford, Steve Jobs, a college drop out, credited a calligraphy class to his inspiration to have beautiful fonts in the Macintosh.