Free On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz Page A

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 passing 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 advertisements, excited text and airbrushed photos vacantly hollering as you weave through the crowds. Before freestanding billboards came into urban spaces, 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 wishing 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 assembled 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-shirts 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 advertisement 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 O s. Instructions, directions, labels, assertions, 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 findingthem, 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