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Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia and the literary executor of the estate of W.H. Auden.
 He is the author of Early Auden, Later Auden, and many essays on (and editions of) nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon.

  • The Human Face of Type

    August 4, 2011

    For me, as for many other people who care about type, a typeface should be personal and expressive, like a human face. For others, type should be an impersonal machine for transmitting data. Each group favors different styles of type. When the documentary film Helvetica appeared a few years ago, I didn’t rush to see it, because, as someone says in the film, Helvetica is “the most neutral typeface,” the one with the least appeal to those whose feelings about type are tangled up with their feelings about people.