Sunday, August 16, 2009

From the mailbag...

The Klezmer Shack's Ari Davidow writes:
Shalom Rav Dm,
I wrote a few words about the koren siddur on the Hebrew type blog http://www.ivritype.com/hebrew/ most of which are there just to point you to a link to a wonderful article in tablet mag--How Eliyahu Koren used typography to encourage a new way to pray (http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/8297/prayer-type/) by Joshua J. Friedman.

It is worth noting that although it has been common to use the dueling languages approach to including Hebrew and English (where the Hebrew is placed to the extreme right; English to the left, so that the eye has to jump the entire width of the spread to go from one starting point on the same line to the other), the calligraphers and early typographers who created the great polyglot siddurim of the Middle Ages were quite aware that when you want the eye to go back and forth between languages, it is critical that the distance between them be as short as possible--that Hebrew and Latin share a common spine (as is the case with the Koren siddur).

But layout depends on purpose. If you have a safe assumption that the readers will use either one language or the other, keeping them far apart (the dueling languages position) is good. Producing two separate books would be even better! More on the Hebrew type blog, of course. (And even more when I finish redoing the blog so that it is more usable. Sorry about that.)

Ari Davidow
Hebrew typesetter, extraordinaire
I seem to have gotten blog smicha lately from various correspondents. Was it the Luft series?

Sneak Attack Media's Miles Grosovsky emails some PR about SAM client, Matisyahu. It included the following photo. Jewish heroin chic. Just what we wuz missing.

Here's a link to a video of the single he's promoting: Matisyahu: One Day.