Heed the Call of Vigorous Commerce!

What is it about the Victorian broadside that so pleases me? Is it simply nostalgia? Portly, vested, mutton-chopped America in the Gilded Age, relentlessly optimistic and vigorous in pursuit of its Manifest Destiny? Mustachioed lawmen eyeing dipsomaniacal pistoleros across dirt streets choked with longhorns? Or perhaps the self-assured, hearth-fire coziness of the British Empire—Sherlock Holmes on the case, the Hindoos subdued, the labouring classes mindful of their place.

Or is it instead the sheer hysteria of the medium? Overblown, stentorian exhortations and adumbrations - "LIFT HIGH THE SHINING CUP OF ENTERPRISE FOR ALL TO SIP!" "SMALL INFRACTIONS, SEVERELY PUNISHED!! A DEFENESTRATION OF PETTY THIEVES IN THE STRAND A FORTNIGHT HENCE!" A zillion different fonts outpointing and outserifing each other.


It resonates with my own, overwrought rhetoric. If I only could, I would post each blog entry in 15 different wood type styles, each one redolent of horse urine, sagebrush, cool granite banks and the sweet cedar of freshly-built gallows.