P. C. Vandall's ‘Ode to a Poem’ first appeared in The Blue Moth of Morning (Porcupine's Quill, 2020). The broadside was created in March 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis, in recognition of the approach of National Poetry Month and with the hope that readers might find comfort—and humour—in poetry.
The text face is Bauer Bodoni, a revival of the so-called Didone serif cut by Giambattista Bodoni in 1798 that was redesigned in 1926 by Heinrich Jost for the Bauer Foundry of Frankfurt as an alternative to the American Type Foundry's (ATF) Bodoni Font Family of 1907. Bodoni is characterized by sharp, thin serifs and is frequently used for display purposes given its high contrast and
very pronounced vertical stress.
The titling is Bodoni Classic Inline, designed by the German typographer Gert Wiescher in 2013.
The somewhat fanciful initial letter is Ransom Shaded, sometimes called Clearcut Shaded Capitals, designed by Will Ransom (1878–1955) who was a contemporary of the celebrated American typographers W. A. Dwiggins and Frederic Goudy.
This broadside is presented as a high-resolution, print-quality PDF (at 600 dpi). It was created with the notion that it could be downloaded by interested parties and printed locally, in colour, on high-end digital printers. It might be framed individually and hung on a wall or (hopefully) printed in small runs for distribution as class sets, to facilitate not only the close reading of a specific poet's text but also a related discussion that might lead to an appreciation of the presentation of that text on paper.