Turnip extolls the virtues of horsiness and ruggedness in text typography.
The typeface is down-to-earth, rustic, chunky, and uneven; I designed it to do
the dirty jobs that the prettier fonts could not. The design that became
Turnip took a long time to congeal. When I moved to Lowell, Massachusetts,
I began to notice that a strangely large percentage of the signage on the
local storefronts was set in Bookman. The owner of the local sign shop must
have loved it, and it started to grow on me too. Around that time I was
flipping through Alexander Lawson’s book and came across a reproduction
of Pynson Printer’s Tom Sawyer, set in Monotype Bookman. I had probably
seen the image twenty times before and had never given it a second look.
This was a completely different kind of book typography. It did not try
to be classic or beautiful, but it was not plainly functional either. It
was ruggedly handsome, and it was anchored by Bookman, a design that —
despite its name — I can’t recall ever seeing in a book. The text was
wide and beefy and a little ungainly, but seemed to fit Tom Sawyer’s
unsophisticated characters and informal dialect better than a classic
oldstyle like Garamond or Bembo.