A Note on the Type

The typeface mostly employed in this book is a modern interpretation of the classic eighteenth-century Didone serif face Bodoni, and known as Filosofia. This was created in 1996 by the Bratislava-born type designer Zuzana Licko, who, with her Dutch-born husband, Rudy Vanderlans, delighted the typographic world during the closing decades of the twentieth century with a whirlwind of type design, largely occasioned by the invention of the Macintosh computer in 1984. Filosofia, with its slightly bulging serifs and lighter-than-classical-Bodoni vertical lines, and easily recognizable with its below-the-baseline numbers 3,4,5,7, and 9, clearly owes much to one of the most beloved of all Italian faces, but is more amiable and less wearing to the eyes when ranged over texts as lengthy and complex as that of The Perfectionists. I am proud that this book’s designer felt once again able to employ this wonderful typeface, and applaud with gratitude its most gifted creator.

SW