How to Clean a Fish And Other Adventures in Portugal by Esmeralda Cabral
Esmeralda Cabral is a Portuguese-Canadian writer living in Vancouver. Her book How to Clean a Fish describes “an extended family stay in Portugal, full of food, adventure, and the search for home.” To quote from the jury comments made at the SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors:
It’s a book that draws the reader in, with its inviting cover, reminiscent of Portuguese tiles and mosaics, and provides a simple map to give us a sense of where Costa da Caparica is in relation to Lisbon, mainland Portugal, and the author’s birthplace on the Azores. Brief chapters set within larger sections named for the seasons of the extended visit help to orient us to the shifts in weather and so on.
The book was designed by Alan Brownoff, designer at the University of Alberta Press. His typeface choice for the cover draws on the topic of reporting from a journey. It’s Olympe, a monospaced script designed by French type designer Émilie Rigaud and released in 2022 through her foundry A is for. Rigaud mentions that her typeface is a revival based on a style found on an Olympia Traveller Deluxe typewriter.
The original went under the name of Olympia Typestyle 69. Contrary to what one might assume, “69” doesn’t refer to the year 1969. The design is older than that, and is shown already in 1962 in Alan Bartram’s article “Typewriter type faces” for Typographica no. 6. There, it’s one of just four styles listed in the Script category. The style was previously digitized by Brett T. Johnson. His Typewriter Olympia SM8 (2016) is rather crude, with letterforms that look autotraced. Rigaud’s interpretation is smoother. In addition to the Regular – which is based on the original, and which is used here – she also added a second lighter weight.
Compared to this typewritten sample of Olympia Typestyle 69, Rigaud smoothed out the connections and closed some of the gaps: pairs like “Nr” and “ic” join up, while others like “Mi” and “ro” maintain the artefacts caused by the technical limitations of the original.
Detail from Alan Bartram’s article “Typewriter type faces” in Typographica no. 6, showing the four styles in the Script category, including Olympia Typestyle 69. The article with its seminal overview of mid-century typewriter styles was reissued in Footnotes A.
