Over the years, some of the letters were lost or broken, but they were horrendously expensive to replace. Since business wasn't booming and we couldn't afford to pay him much in the first place, our printer figured we could make do with what he had. Rs left in our favorite headline font. When I graduated from college and found a job on a daily newspaper with a seemingly unlimited supply of Rs, I knew I'd hit the big time. Three decades later, we've moved from an age of scarcity into an age of typographic overload.
Metal type is a thing of the past.
Thanks to powerful processors, sophisticated software and cheap but versatile printers, virtually every computer desktop is a potential publishing house. Create a document in Microsoft Word or Wordpad, click on the arrow next to the font window at the top of the page, and a long list of typefaces appears. Keep scrolling and you'll be amazed - Microsoft Windows installs 34 different fonts when you load the operating system on your computer. You'll find a lot more if you use desktop publishing or graphics programs. Others are purely decorative - ranging from Olde English diploma fonts to novelty typefaces that look like icicles, drip blood, or use an acrobatic Fred Flintstone to form the characters.