Reading: how to start

  

After I received some responses to my blog about books that inspired people to read, I decided to ask my family the same question. The answers from family and friends were many and varied. I hope that they will interest you as much as they have me.

 

My eldest brother responded: “I can't remember any books that I read as a child. The only books I remember at home was the set of encyclopedias that we used as a table tennis net. When we lived at Swinburne Road [our first family home], I was friendly with Michael Peachey and his family owned the newsagents in Meredith Road and I could read the comics before they were delivered!”

 

My youngest brother and I recall a comic that we read regularly, The Victor, a creature of its time that reflected British class and national attitudes. There was The Tough of the Track (working class), Gorgeous Gus (an aristocrat), “not forgetting of course the comic's educational value in teaching German: Donner und Blitzen, Hande hoch and the rest.” German’, of course, were sinister figures. My brother still has several Victor Annuals. The book which most inspired him was The Little Grey Men by BB (1942), a tale of “the adventures of the last gnomes in England, it is a beautiful evocation of the English countryside. I read it again a few years ago, and still enjoyed it.”

 

Neither of my brothers mentioned books from the public library, although I remember quite clearly borrowing from Ipswich’s central library, particularly the section of biographies of historical figures for children.

 

My sister’s account of her youthful reading was particularly detailed and brought back memories of our childhood in Ipswich. The first children’s book she remembers is Enid Blyton’s Noddy. She recalls most vividly that, because the bus fare to the public library in central Ipswich was expensive, most of her reading came from the commercial lending library at the newsagent and sweet shop of Mr & Mrs Boreham; this was a shelf of books at the counter where we spent our pocket money on sweets. My sister still has some of the books that she read most avidly – indeed one still has the lending label from Mr & Mrs Boreham’s shop marked with her name, so it seems that she forgot to return it. There are children’s/young readers’ classics (Anne of Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn, Little Men). She also read books, popular in their day, but now faded from memory. Jane Shaw’s The Tall Man, one of a series of tales of the adventures of four children in Switzerland. Fiction for Girl Guides was a flourishing market for publishers, including Diana Pares’ Hawthorn Patrol, a source in fictional form of advice about how to be a good Girl Guide.  Reading eventually included adult classics such as Jane Eyre. My sister says that she read avidly two to three books a week sometimes staying up late to finish.

 

 

My sister-in-law (married to my eldest brother) recalled: “I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t reading, although I do remember getting exasperated with children in my class that were slow! A group of us stood around the teacher’s desk and read a sentence each from the same book! As for my own books, I loved Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. I remember having two Listen with Mother [a BBC radio programme] storybooks which I read and re-read, and from when I was a little older, The Secret Garden was a firm favourite. I was brought up on Enid Blyton, of course, and had all the ‘… of Adventure‘ books [eight books about the adventures of two girls and two boys who solve mysteries]. One thing of which I am certain is that a child who is read to develops a love of books for themselves. My mother read to me every night until we were able to share books together, and I feel so pleased that all our three children read avidly and have a great regard for books of all types.”

 

Our own sons had relatively little exposure to the public library, mostly because we had lots of books at home, particularly any published by Macmillan that I picked up at work. Our eldest remembers C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia books, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books and Richmal Crompton’s Just William titles, both long-running tales of schoolboy escapades. Both are well-written humorous and very much idealized portraits of well-to-do English small-town or rural society. They are also decidedly old-fashioned and reflect class attitudes of their day, but their writing and humour still appeals. Jan and I also remember that our son adored Humphrey Carpenter’s Mr Majeka tales of a teacher with magical powers, Gillian Cross’ The Demon Headmaster, featuring a megalomaniac hypnotist out to rule the world. Clearly, school humour appealed. Robin Jarvis’s rather dark books for early teens were a great favourite, his Deptford Mice books, in which a young girl mouse called Audrey battles the sewer rats, the Whitby Witches series and others. Jack London’s Canadian Call of the Wild, was another favourite (as it had been of his father).

 

Our middle son (a dyslexic reader) recalls fondly Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child, an endearing tale of clockwork toys who long to become self-winding, a quest that proves unsuccessful. Like his elder brother, he had a Canadian wilderness favourite, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, a story of a 13-year-old boy’s survival in the Canadian wilderness.

 

Our youngest son’s bedtime reading included one or two Harry Potter books, until we both decided that the were stories well told, but lacked something to tempt us to read more. We changed to all of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, a much more satisfying read for both son and father. Another beautifully written favourite was Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, a gripping story of the battle of the Light against the Dark. I can still visualize some of the episodes.

 

As a bedtime reader, I found the Peter Rabbit books insufferably dull. Later, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books were tedious (as were the films). A brilliant series for younger years was the Church Mice books. Written and illustrated by Graham Oakley, these books combined visual humour and witty dialogue that were endearingly funny for both child and adult.

 

The partners of two of our sons also contributed memories of books that inspired them: our eldest son’s American partner recalls the Dr Seuss books, and our youngest’s Japanese lady read her aunt’s Grimms’ Fairy Tales book when she visited her grandmother’s home in Yokohama.

 

Jan tells me that she and her siblings were taken every week to the public library in Beaconsfield (this was a family expedition since her mother did not drive at the time). The children were free to choose whatever books they liked. Although she adds that the teachers at her convent school discourage reading Enid Blyton.

 

Jan’s brother told me: “My first recollections are of Beatrix Potter I suppose, I remember Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Nicholas Monsarrat’s Three Corvettes and The Cruel Sea [Monsarrat was a notable author of books of naval heroism in World War II] came along later. I soon became more interested in non-fiction in our local library and also the encyclopaedias in Dad’s workroom which at that time became a great way to dip in and discover subjects and people I didn’t know existed, I found it fascinating.” Jan remembers that all three Waddams children enjoyed dipping into Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, first published in magazine form in 1908.

My brother-in-law’s wife said: “The books that I loved as a child were “The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books and her Malory Towers series [set in a girls’ boarding school], pony books by Christine Pullein-Thompson [who wrote more than 100 pony books for children; her mother, two sisters and her daughter wrote another 100 or so], Black Beauty, Jill books by Ruby Ferguson [a writer of popular romance and mystery books for adults, and of nine pony books for children].” As you might guess from this selection, my sister-in-law is a keen horsewoman.

 

A number of friends responded to the item on my blog. One comment was: “Re: Jan's interest in biographies at a young age. I vividly remember reading Amelia Earhart: Girl Aviatrix as a child. I was thrilled to realize girls could do such things!”

 

A friend in the USA, who is a nurse noted: “I loved dog books —- Travels with Charlie, Lad, a Dog, Lassie Come Home, Old Yeller and the Incredible Journey. Also Heidi, all the Cherry Ames books (of course, she’s a nurse) [27 mystery novels set in hospitals, written by Ames and later Julie Campbell Tatham] and all the Nancy Drew books [possibly not literally all, since some 620 have been published; Nancy Drew, the principal character is a teenage sleuth]. I also liked horse books:  Black Beauty, Black Stallion and Misty of Chincoteague.  Let’s just say I was all about animals until I found boys.”

 

Her husband, who shares with me a great admiration of Joseph Conrad, had a different story to tell: “I did not grow up in a house of readers. And I don’t recall any books I fell in love with as a child ... What eventually caught my interest was when I was a preteen, comics. Archie, Superman and especially Mad Magazine, a caustic, subversive hilarious publication [that] American boys in the early 60s were devoted to. In my all-boys Catholic prep high school, I remember falling for Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, Animal Farm by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The main limitation on my education was the emphasis on finding the moral of the story, at the complete expense of how the author told the tale. Then I read Joyce’s Dubliners my first year in college. Then Saint Augustine’s Confessions. And then the same year A Hundred Years of Solitude. All under the guiding hand of a terrific professor. I’ve been hooked ever since.”

 

A friend who is a college professor in Indianapolis recalled a Christmas present from 1961, The Golden Book of America: Stories from our Country’s Past Adapted for Young Readers From American Heritage. He told me: “I was the in third grade. I read it cover to cover during the next few years. Most memorably two years later, I was home sick from school reading it in my back hall bedroom on a particular November Friday. Hearing some commotion in our front hall, I paused from reading the article titled "The Proud Fighting Firemen."  Entering the living room, I heard my grandmother calling down the front stairs to my mother. It was the tragic news from Dallas, Texas. By the way, I kept a copy of the book proudly on display in the college office you visited, once upon a time. In the classroom I'd show it to spark student interest in what I labeled for them as 'the fascinating story of the American people."”

 

To sum up, some of the early childhood favourites were well-established classics, and are therefore hardly surprising. Some reflected childhood passions (ponies, horses, dogs) that became part of adult life. Some authors were enormously popular in their day, but are much less celebrated today. Some were prolific and ploughed a particular furrow: Christine Pullein-Thompson and her family for example. Still well-known today, Enid Blyton authored some 762 books according to Wikipedia. As to how people start to read, the public library was the key for some, but many routes can read to a love of reading.

Dignity

  

We have a neighbour who is a (now retired) Major in the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry. When he. was about to be sent to Afghanistan at the height of the war on terror, his mother came to Sunninghill to have dinner with him and his wife before he left for his tour of duty. His wife told me that his mother said to him “You might die.” He was sent to a very dangerous place in Helmand Province; so much so that all supplies were flown in by helicopters travelling low and at speed, and dropped by parachute. When a British Minister came to visit, the troops were to have a special breakfast of eggs and bacon, but alas the parachute failed to open and the eggs arrived ready-scrambled. Fortunately, my neighbour did not die, and he never mentioned any colleague who was killed, but he did visit wounded comrades in hospital in Birmingham. According to the BBC the rate of casualties (but, of course, not the absolute number) of British soldiers was higher than that of the US military.

 

The reason for telling you this anecdote is that today’s news in the UK is dominated by remarks made by President Trump in an interview with Fox News, that NATO troops did not serve on the front line in Afghanistan. Mr. Trump contends that we Europeans are cowards who have been protected by the USA, but have never done anything to support America. Our Prime minister has called the remarks “insulting and frankly appalling,” and added that if he has “misspoken in that way … I would certainly apologise.”

 

At a dinner in Oxford last night a visiting professor from the USA brought up Mr. Trump’s behaviour. Those of us who had spent time in the USA (in my case over some forty years) agreed that the default behaviour of Americans is an innate courtesy, but not, it seems, of the present President nor of his colleagues in government. This morning I was reminded of an old friend (now deceased) Colonel Robert Nichols, who is buried in Arlington Cemetery, and of his daughter who served in the army like her father. Bob believed without qualification that it was his duty to uphold the honour and dignity of America’s armed forces. I do not doubt that he would have been appalled by his current Commander-in-Chief’s lack of dignity and innate moral coruption, and of his Secretary of War, and other government officials.

What did YOU read?

 

In the UK 2026 is the National Year of Reading. The National Literacy Trust estimates that some 5 million adults in my country are functionally illiterate (defined as having a reading age equivalent to that of an 11-year-old child). At the prize giving of one of my sons’ schools the speaker said that he often visited the building of the Trades Union Congress for meetings and came to know a security guard who worked there. This guard was always reading his newspaper at all hours of the day. However, the speaker later discovered that the apparently avid reader was absolutely unable to read – he bought his newspaper to conceal his shame.

 

I have spent my working life in a world of literate people, and find it difficult to comprehend a world in which an adult cannot read.

 

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 has been promoting the National Year of Reading in 2026 by inviting writers to talk about the book that encouraged them to read, and to read an extract from it. A few days ago, Val Mcdermid chose The Wind in the Willows and read an extract in which a young woman proposes a plan to Toad, in jail for diving too fast, to escape dressed as her aunt, the prison washer woman. Thisreminded me of reading of Toad’s stay in prison. He is brought a plate of toast lavishly buttered, so much so that the butter drips through holes in the toast. I remember my mouth watering as I read.

 

Jan recalls reading The Wind in the Willows and Toad of Toad Hall. Also, girls’ books, which I would have avoided of course: Ballet Shoes, the Heidi books, Little Women, What Katie Did. The public library had a collection of biographies of great figures from history, which she recalls borrowing.

 

The Central Library in Ipswich also had a section of those biographies. I worked my way steadily through the shelves, I had a thing for history: great favourites were Rosemary Sutcliffe’s books (The Eagle of the Ninth and so on) and Robert Graves.

 

Which has made me wonder what you remember reading. Send me your lists and I’ll compile them for the blog.

 

We will be making our own contribution to the National Year of Reading in Sunninghill on 20 April when six authors will visit our primary school to fill the day with talk of books:

 

Fiona Barker (https://fionabarker.co.uk/)

Tilly Rand-Bell (https://www.tiliarandbell.com/)

Nicholas Allan (https://www.nicholasallan.co.uk/)

Laura Mucha (https://lauramucha.com/)

David Barker (https://davidbarkerauthor.co.uk/)

Ally Sherrick (https://allysherrick.com)

 

Nicholas Allan is also a member of the Magic Circle and proved his ability to read my mind over lunch.

Calibri: not so woke after all

 

One reason for maintaining my blog is that it keeps me in touch with friends in many different places, who often know more about a topic than I do. Toby Bainton wrote the following to me about the question of the Calibri and Times New Roman typefaces prompted by Secretary Marco Rubio’s designation of Times New Roman as the official typeface of the State Department, suggesting that the adoption of Calibri had been a wasteful DEIA initiative of the Biden administration:

 

“I have a strictly amateur interest in typography. Stanley Morison designed Times New Roman fulfilling a commission from The Times, which wanted, not surprisingly, a type which is legible in newspaper columns at very small sizes. The design is brilliant for that purpose. It is also very good as a normal-sized type for letterpress work, and was for many years the standard type used by HMSO.  It is pretty useless as a display face, for example in very large sizes, such as on the side of an aircraft. In those instances it looks bland and lacking in style. That's because it was designed for a quite different purpose.

Sans serif faces are nowadays generally preferred for reading on a computer screen. This has less to do with the serifs themselves than with the gradations of width in the appearance of letters with serifs. You only need to take a look at a lower case e in Times New Roman to see that it has marked variations in the thickness of the letter-form across its curves. This helps legibility on the page but causes problems once computers come in.

In computer-based work, typefaces are routinely blown up or shrunk down optically. If you do this with a thick-and-thin serif type, you get less legible results than with the more uniform cross-section of sans serif type. This is because when you enlarge or shrink something optically, the height and breadth of the letter may be (for example) doubled or halved, but if you double or halve the x-height, the *area* of shading on the thick-and-thin strokes then increases or decreases by a factor of four. This is simple arithmetic but it makes a crucial difference to the appearance of the letter.

Personally my ideal when reading is a serif type in good crisp letterpress. Very rare these days. Sans serif types are generally best as display faces (for example, the ubiquitous Gill Sans is fantastically successful as a display face but quite tiring to read in small sizes as a text face). But sans serif faces have their value in text on the screen for mathematical reasons. You can get away more easily with optical re-sizing, with less apparent distortion to the letter form.

 

So my conclusion regarding Times New Roman versus Calibri is that in the computer-based text age, Calibri is (unfortunately) better for everyone, whether visually-impaired or not. This has nothing to do with wokery – you just have to do the math.”

 

Another friend, Colin Ridler, a colleague from Thames & Hudson days, commented:

 

“In fact, Ian, serifs are there to AID readability because they hold the eye on the line left to right.
As for T[hames] & H[udson], while I agree the best designers consider readability, much depends on leading and typesize as well as typeface. Often designers, who come from graphic design courses, are trained to think about pictures on a page, with text readability a secondary concern. Moreover, some designers are not READERS and set text too small or with too long a line length. But in your field of textbooks, readability is emphasized more. “

 

Lastly, I discussed serif and sans serif with my brother-in-law, a former graphic designer.  He said that his designs maintained a consistent look (including typeface) across the different elements of a campaign (ad, brochure etc.). For his work, serif was generally selected for work that referred to tradition and history. Sans serif conveyed a sense of modernity.

Calibri: not so woke after all

One reason for maintaining my blog is that it keeps me in touch with friends in many different places, who often know more about a topic than I do. Toby Bainton wrote the following to me about the question of the Calibri and Times New Roman typefaces prompted by Secretary Marco Rubio’s designation of Times New Roman as the official typeface of the State Department, suggesting that the adoption of Calibri had been a wasteful DEIA initiative of the Biden administration:

 

I have a strictly amateur interest in typography. Stanley Morison designed Times New Roman fulfilling a commission from The Times, which wanted, not surprisingly, a type which is legible in newspaper columns at very small sizes. The design is brilliant for that purpose. It is also very good as a normal-sized type for letterpress work, and was for many years the standard type used by HMSO.  It is pretty useless as a display face, for example in very large sizes, such as on the side of an aircraft. In those instances it looks bland and lacking in style. That's because it was designed for a quite different purpose.

Sans serif faces are nowadays generally preferred for reading on a computer screen. This has less to do with the serifs themselves than with the gradations of width in the appearance of letters with serifs. You only need to take a look at a lower case e in Times New Roman to see that it has marked variations in the thickness of the letter-form across its curves. This helps legibility on the page but causes problems once computers come in.

In computer-based work, typefaces are routinely blown up or shrunk down optically. If you do this with a thick-and-thin serif type, you get less legible results than with the more uniform cross-section of sans serif type. This is because when you enlarge or shrink something optically, the height and breadth of the letter may be (for example) doubled or halved, but if you double or halve the x-height, the *area* of shading on the thick-and-thin strokes then increases or decreases by a factor of four. This is simple arithmetic but it makes a crucial difference to the appearance of the letter.

Personally my ideal when reading is a serif type in good crisp letterpress. Very rare these days. Sans serif types are generally best as display faces (for example, the ubiquitous Gill Sans is fantastically successful as a display face but quite tiring to read in small sizes as a text face). But sans serif faces have their value in text on the screen for mathematical reasons. You can get away more easily with optical re-sizing, with less apparent distortion to the letter form.

 

So my conclusion regarding Times New Roman versus Calibri is that in the computer-based text age, Calibri is (unfortunately) better for everyone, whether visually-impaired or not. This has nothing to do with wokery – you just have to do the math.   

Oh woke is me?

 

Typography does not often make headlines, but shortly before Christmas, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, unwittingly reminded me a good friend from my publishing past. Richard Garnett was the son of David (“Bunny”) Garnett, a novelist, publisher and member of the Bloomsbury Group. Richard was born into this set of bohemian, in some cases bisexual, writers and artists. He recalled playing in the garden with Virginia Woolf.

 

I first met Richard when he was the editorial director of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (a new version of a classic and much-revered reference work). We later worked together on The Dictionary of Art (published in 1996), the largest art history publishing venture of the 20^th century. Richard was a fine editor, author and typographer. 

 

Cover of Richard's Jack of Dover

 

When Mr. Rubio reminded me of Richard, I hunted on my bookshelf for a book, Jack of Dover, published in 1966 by Rupert-Hart Davis, that he had given me many years ago. Richard had written it for his son, Oliver, then ten years old. My copy is inscribed “For Christopher [my eldest son, then aged four] in due course from Richard Garnett Christmas 1987.” I can’t tell you what the typeface is, but it is set throughout in a readable serif typeface (serif type has, my dictionary says, “a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter”). I don’t know whether Richard chose the typeface, but it is likely that he did, since he worked for Hart-Davis. Illustrations are by Graham Oakley, a name familiar to all my sons since I read Oakley’s witty and engaging (for child and adult) Church Mice books, published by Macmillan, to them at bedtime many times.

A spread from Jack of Dover.

I must confess that typography is a publishing skill that was not my forte, but I recall Richard lamenting declining standards of typography in an age of computer typesetting. On the other hand, when I worked at Thames & Hudson, typography and overall design, for readability, elegance and appropriateness were the subject of considerable attention and discussion.

 

It was in connection with typography that Mr. Rubio reminded me of Richard. Shortly before Christmas Mr Rubio changed the State Department’s official typeface to Times New Roman from Calibri. Times New Roman had been the official typeface previously, but was changed to Calibri by Mr. Rubio’s predecessor Anthony Blinken, on the grounds that Calibri is more accessible to readers who are visually impaired and generally more accessible in a digital age. Calibri is a san-serif typeface and is the default used in Microsoft Windows. According to its designer, who was interviewed BBC Radio 4, Calibri was designed to be easily read on screen and to cause few errors when using text-to-speech and optical character recognition tools.

 

Media coverage of the decision quoted Mr. Rubio as saying that Times New Roman conveys an appropriate clarity and formality in State Department communications, but also characterized the change as ending a wasteful DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) initiative. I found this emphasis on DEIA questionable, possibly silly.

 

However, full text of Mr. Rubio’s reasoning is at a site called Daring Fireball:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_state_dept_directive_times_new_roman. The author of this site criticizes the coverage of the decision in the New York Times for distorting Mr, Rubio’s reasoning by placing undue emphasis on his reference to DEIA.

 

Now, it is true that the statement that justifies the decision is lengthy and reasoned. Mr. Rubio observes that the Foreign Affairs Handbook states that a serif typeface is “appropriate to the Department’s dignity and position as a senior cabinet-level department.” Further, he argues that serif typefaces originate from Roman antiquity, and that other government bodies use a serif typeface, for example the White House, the Supreme Court. Furthermore, President John F. Kennedy chose a serif typeface for the words “United States of America” on the fuselage of Air Force One.

 

Mr. Rubio, further justifies restoring the use of a serif font by noting that “the number of accessibility-based document remediation cases at the Department of State was the same in the year after adopting Calibri as in the year before (1,192 cases in FY2024 versus 1,193 cases in FY2022).” And that “the costs of remediation actually increased by $145,000 in that period – nearly a 20% jump.” Technical remediation refers to work required to ensure that files are compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers. It is worth noting that the annual budget of the State Department is $58.8 billion, so a $145,000 does not constitute large scale waste. It should also be noted that such cases are one very narrow measure of accessibility; there may well have been instances of visually impaired people finding documents in Calibri easy to read and not reporting their experience to the State Department for the simple reason that there was nothing to report, no remediation, only success that involved no cost or labour. Moreover, those who benefit from accessibility include not just the visually impaired who use assistive technology, but, for example, dyslexic people who require simple, readable type: as the father of a dyslexic son I am especially aware of their requirements. So Mr. Rubio’s case may not be proved at all.

 

I wondered whether Mr. Rubio’s assertion that the adoption of a san serif typeface was inherently wasteful, really stands up to scrutiny. General Services Administration Services Administration guidelines state that “For people with good vision, a typeface with serifs is slightly easier and faster to read than one without serifs. Typically, for people with low vision, the serifs significantly degrade legibility. The importance of using a sans serif typeface is especially important for digital content since it is typically read on-screen and not in hardcopy print.” The GSA further states that other factors, such as colour, contrast, the ability to resize text, reflow and text spacing contribute to readability (think dyslexics here). The accessibility guidelines of the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK recommend the use of san serif. However, some brief browsing online led me to studies and opinion pieces that suggest that serif typeface may not be inherently less accessible than san serif, and that other design factors affect readability. It seems that that matter is not settled, but one hopes that Mr Rubio considered the people behind his decision, rather than the politics.

 

Just before Christmas I read the obituary of a typographer, John Morgan, who designed the books of Common Worship of the Anglican church. Morgan introduced an elegant, appealing design with plenty of white space and Gill Sans type, chosen for its fresh and clear appearance. The design was also intended to be easy to read, including by visually impaired worshipers. His obituary noted that the books are often used in dimply lit churches, so ease of reading was key for all worshipers.

 

Thames & Hudson, where I worked for the last thirteen years of my publishing life, pays particular attention to typeface. The criteria for selecting types include clarity, accessibility, elegance and appropriateness. DEIA was never discussed. In the books I published, serif type was used for the main body of the text, but good san serif typefaces were selected (often but not always) for elements such as headings, captions, special features, and the like to distinguish them typographically from the main text. The interests of the reader were always the criterion for the use of typefaces.

 

I also noted that the UK Foreign Office’s official typefaces for both print and online use are san serif. The type selected for print use is Helvetica Neue, which is said to reflect heritage and modernity.

 

My own view on this minor typographical controversy, is that Mr. Rubio’s decision is not entirely unreasoned. However, his remark that “although switching to Calibri was not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA [under the previous administration] … it was nonetheless cosmetic” is not proved by the evidence he provided. Moreover, his remark reveals a predisposition to consider efforts to improve accessibility wasteful, especially if implemented by the previous administration. In short accessibility is inherently suspicious, if not bad, and especially if it was the work of the Biden administration.

 

I am left wondering what Richard Garnett would have said about the matter. Whatever he might have decided, his judgement would have been wise and well informed. I wonder if that is true of Mr. Rubio.

Building a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship in Suffolk

 

Shortly before Christmas we met my youngest brother Tim and Dave his lurcher dog in Melton where, in the late 19^th-century, my great grandfather Charles Jacobs preached in the Methodist chapel. We walked along the banks of the river Deben. It was a beautiful sunny day. A meandering line of ancient wooden stakes guided the eye across the mud, where the odd bird was seeking its lunch. Nobody can be quite sure what the function of the old wooden structures might have been. They may be remnants of old wharves and jetties, perhaps salt marsh defences, or may have been connected to the Tide Mill. Our walk reminded me of the beauty of my native Suffolk landscape.

Woodbidge and the River Deben at low tide.

 

About 1,400 years ago, an Anglo-Saxon ship passed by where we walked bearing the body of a chieftain or king and treasures, now in the British Museum, that were to be buried with him at Sutton Hoo on the opposite bank of the river. The ship was 26 metres long, made with the wood of eight trees, 26 ribs, 3,598 iron or copper rivets. In a shed near the Tide Mill work has been underway since 2018 to build a replica of the burial ship using the techniques of 7^th-century Anglo-Saxon ship makers.

 

The Sutton Hoo replica under construction.

 

 

The structure of the external parts of the ship have been calculated from the records of the archaeological excavation at Sutton Hoo. However, the internal structures of the ship had been removed, probably to make the ship lighter to drag up the hill to its burial site, and to accommodate the burial chamber in its centre. Those parts of the ship are being reconstructed using partial data from Sutton Hoo, supplemented by information gleaned from other ship remains of a similar age. The Sutton Hoo ship was certainly propelled by oars. Whether it also had a mast and sails is a matter of conjecture.

A scale model of the ship.

 

The launch is planned for summer 2027.