I am standing at the mantel of the fireplace
my grandfather built and I am correcting
the time on a digital clock. The figures
tumble past, little connect-the-dot people;
I think about 9 pin and 12 pitch type,
OCR characters, bar codes. I know
some people think digital fonts are ugly,
but any alphabet is beautiful, any scratch
conceives for us mathematically, if not
immaculately; the letters illuminate the
source and claim it as kind. I am leaning
on something that leans on itself. The rock
is steel from which my matrix is cut, and
I am writing in time on my inheritance.
the 9 pin and the 12 pitch type sounds cool.
http://www.awordofsubstance.wordpress.com
The first cheap commercial, computer driven, printers were dot matrix — the nine pins were the print heads and pitch refers to different sizes of type. You could print a roman and serif — and small graphics as well. It was state of the art … at one point in time.