Fraktur mon Amour is one of those finger-tingling books that you can’t wait to get your hands on. It has a pebbled black cover with embossed gothic type that manages to feel inexplicably airy and modern. The book’s heft and proportions seem modeled after a personal bible (but the King James doesn’t usually have hot pink edges). The design is both clean and opulent, reverent and cheeky. It’s clear that author Judith Schalansky hugs blackletter. If the definition of hug included sneaking into its house at night and smelling the clothes it’s just taken off. Maybe obsession is a better word. The book opens with a series of perfunctory letters of introduction (in which Schalansky sounds a wee bit defensive as she breaks down how neo-nazis are historically ignorant in their use of blackletter. That’s my biggest complaint about them too!) The letters are interspersed with a few pages showing photographs of blackletter in use (a Chiclets box, a Beyonce poster…) Then things get down to business. There are eight chapters, each of which is a rigorous catalog of one style of blackletter. For those of us who like to organize things (every graphic designer since the dawn of time?) this categorization is fascinating and delightfully in-depth. I’d never really noticed how rotunda might differ from schwabacher or textura. Within the chapters, each typeface gets its own spread. There’s a character set on the right, and some typographic shenanigans on the left — a lacy pattern of lower-case ds, an overlapping collage of glyphs, or a single enormous form, cropped to a full bleed. The variation creates dynamic pacing within a potentially suffocating system. The first publisher of Fraktur explained that one of Schalansky’s challenges was to “match the quality of the first few sample pages in the rest of the book.” This might be where she fell short. As a dense, 720 page mass, the compositions are irresistible. But when I started to look at each one individually, (how the glyphs align in a pattern, or the relationship of the page edge with the cropped form) the details aren’t always refined. In this way, Fraktur is really most successful as an object. Let there be no doubt that I still hug this book. But I think I’ll keep it in a healthy, platonic kind of way. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Oh and not to be the crazy cat lady, but I have to add that my cat yarfed directly on the cover. For those of you with infants or hangovers, it should be noted that Fraktur is also plesantly vomit-proof, and cleaned up real nice.