Patrick Crerand
About the
Font
This text was
set in Sükerhunde (Condensed), a typeface once thought typical of the Dutch
Golden Age, but now more commonly known as the creation of Benny “How Sweet It Aint”
Van Tiffin (1893-1943), an American entrepreneur and portly associate of Murder
Incorporated, a
The name’s origin stems from the infamous sugar cookies Benjamin
Van Tiffin carried with him, roughly hewn into canine shapes and sometimes left
as calling cards at the scene of Murder Incorporated hits. The story, felt to
be apocryphal, comes from his childhood. Van Tiffin’s mother was deathly
allergic to domestic animals and would not allow him to have one, forcing Van
Tiffin to make his own pet by biting a sugar cookie into the shape of a dog.
The inevitable ostracizing he received from his parents and peers for carrying
the sugar dog and the effect of inclement weather on such a fragile creation
fueled Van Tiffin’s antisocial, psychopathic rage as an adult and led to his
eventual distaste for all things sweet in life. He turned to books later in
life and took a shine to printing untraceable death threats to pastry chefs in
his new font just before his trial in 1943.
After Van Tiffin’s electrocution, Sükerhunde (Condensed),
emancipated and adrift in New York without a patron, ran with a fast crowd and
spent dark nights on prize-fight posters in alleys, earning little to no money
— a bitter harbinger of its life in print for the next several decades. During
the haze of the Free Love Era, it took solace in the arms of Arial, became
hooked on pills and found itself italicized for days at a time, sprawled across
the bellies of patchouli parlor harlots in sappy poems about the earth and
harvest moon tides. A decade later you could find it in most disco era
bathrooms, snorting up its dinner, its more useful letters long ago pawned off,
including the cross of its lowercase t
and the dot to its i — anything to
stay italic for just a little bit
longer. Like so many other weaker fonts of the 80s, Garamond pimped it out to
the subtitles of foreign skin films for less than a cent a word. It raced
across the frames in bold to cover
the scars on its face and vowels to no avail. While it did find a brief
resurgence in the nineties with the advent of computers, later versions of most
word-processing programs replaced it with flashier, newer fonts like Catamaran Condensed and Arabizzo 1 and 2. It was not until its e turned schwa in 2000 that it finally
got clean, joined a good Bible-based church and became the staple of many
philological workbooks like the one you have just read.
Sükerhunde (Condensed) currently lives in Palo Alto with Sandy,
its golden retriever companion, and takes life one day at a time.
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Last updated:November 10. 2005.