Month: August 2009

Albert Goodwill Spalding was the great impressario of professional baseball in its early years, a pitcher of unparalleled ability who leveraged his skill on the diamond into the sporting goods empire that still bears his name. He was the power behind the National League, the owner of its Chicago franchise (today’s Cubs), and the man responsible for disseminating the game’s ersatz Genesis story, according to which Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented the sport in Cooperstown. When it came to wrapping the game in the American flag, there was no owner more skilled than Spalding, who went so far as to take a pair of teams on a world tour in the winter of 1888 with the stated mission to spread the game and the American way clear around the globe. (That trip is the subject of my book, Spalding’s World Tour.) Given this history, you might think Spalding would make his home in a Colonial manse of ample proportion—something traditional, with a white picket fence and plenty of leg room. Think again. In his golden years, Spalding moved from Chicago to San Diego, where he and his second wife helped fashion a compound for proponents of Theosophy, the inscrutable quasi-mystical religion founded by the Russian-born visionary Madame Helena Blavatsky. It seems unlikely Spalding was ever serious about the religious aspects of Theosophy, though he supported its progressive educational ideas, and appears happy to have humored his wife’s interest in it. (Some conspiracy minded historians have noted a Theosophist connection to Doubleday.)

The house the Spaldings built for themselves (seen at top in 1901) was an oriental fantasy, an octagonal structure with an external spiral staircase, extensive internal carvings, and a crystal on the roof that somehow helped the inhabitants channel their energies. Spalding, for the record, spent most of his time on the private nine-hole golf course he built adjacent to the house, often engaging in Republican politics. After his death, and that of his wife, the entire project lost its chief financial benefactors, and dissolved. The house, however, remains, and today is the administration building for the evangelical Point Loma Nazarene University. They’ve done a lovely job maintaining it, as the photos here illustrate. Whatever one thinks of the school’s teachings, it seems an eminently appropriate adaptation.

When you think about national schools of typography, Belgium isn’t the first country that comes to mind. There’s Switzerland, birthplace of Helvetica and home to an indigenous school of gridded modern design. From Italy we have classicism, from France neoclassicism. Holland generally overshadows its southern neighbor in the design fields. Belgium, however, has a distinctive typographic identity that is both steeped in history and essentially optimistic, if not playful. Two fine examples: the “A” of Antwerp’s city logo, with its blinking hash marks, and the bulbous “B” that is the ubiquitous symbol for the Belgian railway system. Both suggest the national obsession with the comic strip—Belgium, after all, is the country that has given us Tintin.

Any discussion of Belgian typography naturally begins with Antwerp’s Plantin Press, founded in 1555 by the French emigre Christophe Plantin. Under his direction, and later under the oversight of his grandson Balthasar Moretus, the press, distinguished by its famous compass colophon, was the preeminent clearinghouse for humanist ideas in Northern Europe, and was renowned also for its elegant, beautifully made books. (Peter Paul Rubens, a childhood friend of Moretus, often contributed illustrations and designs, and also published with the house.) Today, a visit to the Plantin-Moretus Museum is one of the great pleasures of any trip to Antwerp. The old presses and type matrices look like they’re still in working order.

I would suggest that there’s no more enjoyable place for the modern typophile to stroll than a quiet lane in Brussels or Bruges, Ghent or Antwerp. To each his own, we all have our favorites. I’m partial to the elegant curling serifs that mark an old Antwerp warehouse. Not hard to figure out why.