 I'm just excited to see anyone here on a Sunday morning so thank you guys so much for showing up as Chris said yeah I've been here a few years back in 2012 I was my first icon was Milwaukee and I got to present my film lineup the film there so thank you again to Soda for asking me back so today I would like to tell you very much about the beautiful island of San Serif so we need to go back in time a little bit to learn about the island of San Serif we need to go back to April 1st 1977 I actually have a copy of the newspaper from the Guardian so the Guardian newspaper if you don't know a newspaper from London England and on this edition it's a pretty normal newspaper here we've got some some pretty typical things that are happening at the time first of all President Carter from the United States is kind of negotiating with the Soviet Union and the Russians are sticking to a hard line here they're being tough one of my other favorite things on the front here is pubs charge too much so if you guys go to a pub in 1977 and you order just a soft drink and mixer the they cost too much according to the Price Commission report published yesterday so that's good to know you need to buy a logger if you go another thing that I like down here is to go ahead for safer cigarettes not sure quite how that one worked out but it's there any Europeans in the audience will recognize the joke even back in 1977 they hated the Eurovision Song Contest and then it is April in London so pretty typical weather outbreaks of rain with some bright intervals so what's interesting about this newspaper is it's fairly normal but on page 17 here right next to a color television ad there starts a seven page article all about the island of sans serif and it starts on page 17 goes to page 7 or 23 and it's seven pages talking about this beautiful island of sans serif it talks about the island itself of course it has a map it I mean it's an island so they show photos of palm trees they talk about their leaders their military all those sorts of things so it's a fairly typical and interesting article about the island of sans serif I do have to tell you it's all one big elaborate joke so it's April 1st so it's April Fool's Day which I have to admit I always felt April Fool's was really stupid I even as a kid I remember thinking wait adults like play kind of stupid jokes on each other I just thought it was stupid but I also wanted to point out I while I was preparing my talk I asked Siri what is the origins of April Fool's Day and I can't tell if it's a plain a joke on me or if it misunderstood because it says it looks like the answer is about 10.21 US dollars so I'm not sure so yes the island of sans serif does not exist this is entirely a joke but I would I'd like to present to you that is the most elaborate joke ever done I think at least in print so let's talk about the island of sans serif some fast facts here you may notice something interesting about this island it is actually in the shape of a semi colon and it is actually if you notice here on this inset the map it is halfway between Africa and India and they literally just put a semi colon right there by the hand I thought that was great population 1.7 million the capital is Badoni there tour centers of Garamond Villa Pica Gil cameo cap M and Umbra the currency of sans serif is the sans serif corona which if you know corona is a typeface name and it's and the corona is broken up into a hundred m's which is pretty funny and it's a pretty strong currency actually at that time in 1977 the corona is one corona equals 4.3 British sterling pounds which is pretty strong and then here's a nice little quote from the guide to the Republic English is the working language Caslon is used as ceremonial occasions and there is the language keyflong indigenous to the flongs the flongs for the native people of the island so of course there are so many amazing printers puns in this so let me I just want to point out some first of all of course the name sans serif sans serif typeface the island shape itself is the is a semi colon what's fun about it you see up here is Casa superior and Casa inferior or the upper and lower case islands and it's just there's just so many jokes I I imagine whoever made this map had so much fun making this map so starting at the top up here pie island if you're not familiar when you pie type it's a letter press term when you pie type is when you drop type all over the place and you kind of lose it you don't want to pie or type right down here is port Elrod now as we learned last night in the quiz the Elrod machine was a hot metal strip casting machine that made lads and slugs back when lads were actual lead all over the island there are amazing port Clarendon Badoni Erebar all these different cities Perpetua Umbra Garamondo my absolute favorite down here on the southern island place I would spend a lot of time Gil Sands which I just love it makes me so happy Gil Sands I thought that was really damn clever Gil cameo Monte Tempo Monte Allegro I just imagine like old British printers just just laughing a lot about this over here to the left there's actually a small island off of these islands that's owned by Spain called Ovamata which is actually a joke about over matter it's type that doesn't fit in a column in design now calls it kind of like type is over set but it's type that doesn't fit in the column then right down here is the Waj of type and I didn't know I didn't understand this term but I asked had to ask some UK friends but a Waj Waj I guess I don't even know how to say it is a bulk quantity of something so the Waj of type is a bulk quantity of type and then there's there's all these printing terms Villa Pica Pearl Island cap M and then at the very south part of the island 30 point which I thought was clever the last thing I will talk about is so a flung these are the native people of sans-serif but if you don't know a flung is actually it's a curved papier machet or paper machet play a thing so I'll explain it so back in 1977 of course all newspapers are still for the most part done by letterpress online of types and then they put everything together the the leads the slugs of the type that everything's together they put it together and they would put what's called a flung down it they would press it into the paper that would then become a mold they curve it and then they pour hot metal into the flung and that would make a curved printing plate that would go on the giant rotary presses so a pretty in-depth joke there with the flung but I thought it was pretty clever so there's so many articles in this and I will tell you I have this newspaper I'm gonna be out at the back I please come and look at it because there's so many good articles but I don't only have time to show one full article but this article is called transposed by the time tides and it's a very in-depth scientific look on the fact that the island of Sandsarief is technically moving and it's moving because there's very strong neep and spring tides and I wanted to read this one quote the islands will accelerate at first gently and then more and more rapidly as they approach Sri Lanka simple calculations based on the present movement of 1400 meters a year and an exponential acceleration rate it suggests that the island group will hit the coast of Sri Lanka at a velocity of 940 kilometers per hour on January 3rd 2011 so I don't remember anything happening to Sri Lanka on January 3rd 2011 but it's great and so what's funny about this is if you didn't understand that this was a joke and if you were just reading your newspaper with your morning tea you might actually realize like these there's all of these articles that talk about different things that are actually you know reasonably interesting and reasonably understandable but what makes this entire segment the seven pages really really work are the advertisements the there are legitimate advertisements from legitimate companies but they're in on the joke so all these companies so there's this one from the cricket lighters Sandsarief is the perfect country with a strong economy and equitable policies that's because all the workers by late cricket lighters instead of silly old matches so there are never any strikes isn't it so so I want to show you a few of the ads if you've seen anything about Sandsarief before you would have possibly seen this ad this is a ad for Kodak if you've got a photograph of Sandsarief Kodak would love to see it the beauty of Sandsarief is legendary from the serene stately grander of cap and opera house to the hustle and bustle of the harbor at Port Clarendon the islands abound and colorful memories just waiting to be faithfully captured on Kodak film Kodak are looking for photographs taken by amateur photographers with truly which truly reflect the evanescent beauty of these fabulous islands they will be collected together to form an exhibition called the legendary beauty of Sandsarief which will be mounted again this time next year if you have photographs of Sandsarief which you might feel suitable for the exhibition please ring the number before noon today so of course it's funny by noon half these people haven't actually even yet read their newspaper but it's kind of funny any Guinness beers drinkers in the audience will know again this is a strong dark beer with a with a white foam head but something's a little different and the island of Sandsarief it was after the freak barley crop of 1956 the local inhabitants of Sandsarief first began to notice a change in their beer the taste was the same but the white head turned black and the strong body was white experts put it down to the novice farm helpers who spent their holiday in Sandsarief that year knowing little bit about little about crops they soak the barley seeds upside down and there's more to this copy but I just thought that was great and then you could actually write in to get a free Sandsarief Guinness conversion kit so to get your Sandsarief Guinness cut out the coupon putting it upside down in the envelope for easy sorting and then send it to so I just thought that was really well clever I mean I imagine the copywriters had a lot of fun with these ads another ad is for a company called Costain and I didn't know what who or what Costain was but they're actually a huge manufacturing and construction company and they actually are most well known for building the tunnel under the English channel the channel so I mean they're a huge conglomerate but the Costain group is building a new harbor for his excellency General Paika oh I forgot to tell you the leader of the the country is MJ Paika was his name and the east coast of Sandsarief a new type of building technique is using dito blocks being used to build to see levels 0.918 units thick so 0.918 of course is 0.918 of an inch is type high and on the upper and lower cases the current of the wall is ranged that its points break up the wave motion to see whilst allowing the water to flow through the confidence of the general is well justified as the project will be going to bed three months ahead of schedule so going to bed is at the end of a print run you would put it to bed is kind of a colloquial printer's term so I just thought it was really really clever and the last ad I'll show you is from the company Texaco when two weeks at in Sandsarief as a guest of James Hunt now I'm not really a big formula one or motor racing fan but I do know that James Hunt was a very very famous and popular racer at this time and so you and your guests will be flown first class to Sandsarief by chartered aircraft and driven to your hotel overlooking the famous Cocoa Banana Beach which of course is a plan Cocoa Banana Beach and then if you look down here in the bottom right there's a bit of a there's some competition right I don't know anyway that the information that you would send in says competition closes March 31st 1977 and all entries postmarked after that date will be ineligible which of course was the day before but again if you're reading these and you're just flipping through others an ad for Kodak there's no ad for Texaco you may not notice it so who did this obviously it took a lot of work and how did they do so Philip Davies advertising rep he came up with the idea of the fake island he said in an interview that apparently this telegraph which was a competing newspaper at that time kept always making these ridiculous features about these obscure islands that no one had ever heard of and so he just kind of wanted to make fun of it and so he decided let's just make up a fake island Jeffrey Taylor he's the foreign editor editor at the Guardian so he's the foreign editor he created most of the content and design the islands Stuart St. Clair Lege he was a special reports editor he actually came up with the idea and the name of Sansarief Mark Arnold Forster and Tim Radford wrote various articles and then another clincher as I said Jay Walter Thompson ad agency a huge huge agency they sold advertising space for the supplement and I think that's actually how this got approved because if you think about 1977 the amount of labor to do seven pages in a newspaper it's so much work and so much money but he they sold the ads to all these companies and I thought that was really clever I do I do wish that I could have figured out or found out how they got away with this I just can't imagine that anyone in any you know I can't see any newspaper doing this today but maybe it was a little more relaxed in the 70s so what was the public reaction there were apparently this was a huge hit and there was tons of phone calls received at the Guardian wanting more information about the island of Sansarief you know they had never been there they they had never heard of it they wanted to go tons of complaints from travel agents literally people called their travel agents saying book me a flight or I want to take a boat to Sansarief but it doesn't exist the Guardian printed I've been to Sansarief bumper stickers and a t-shirt and I desperately tried to find an image of this but I couldn't find it but apparently they sold them to readers and they sold really quite well and then of course some people were in on the joke there was a letter to the editor received from the Sansarief Liberation Front stating how furious they were about the pro government slants of the Guardian piece which I thought was pretty interesting so this has this whole thing is kind of has its own legacy it kind of keeps going in 1978 and 1999 the Guardian wrote follow-up articles they weren't as clever they weren't as interesting but they did twice on April Fool's those dates listed as number five the top five top 100 April Fool's day hopes is of all time apparently a Texas man created a Sansarief diplomatic plates for his car but I think it's pretty clever and so this is interesting this is an image of a certificate of deposit at the bank of Sansarief Donald Knuth is a teacher at the computer science department in Stanford University apparently he writes a lot of books about computer science and if anyone finds an error in one of his books he sends them a certificate of deposit and keeps an online version a website of who has found errors and what their deposit amount at the bank of Sansarief is which I think is pretty clever in 2006 wiki travel did in a very impressive and very extensive April Fool's joke about the island of Sansarief including designing the Sansarief national flag which I thought was pretty damn clever of course it's just an asterisk one thing I do want to show you because I love show and tell is this right here Henry Morris of the Bird and Bull Press in 1988 printed an entire two book volume about the island of Sansarief including printing beautiful 25 corona banknotes a stock certificate of the bird and bull press who was established there at the in the island of Sansarief and most ridiculous of all and I have this and I'm so excited to show it off he designed and minted an actual silver coin for the island of Sansarief it's a hundred so I'm feeling pretty good you know pretty rich these days with my hundred coronas but I just think when you take it to that extreme that's pretty interesting and I just think that's a really interesting legacy of the island of Sansarief so no type con res presentation would be without a call upon and thankfully I got to use Guardian Egyptian headline and Guardian Sans headline which is the current typeface the Guardian newspaper makes a design by commercial type and when I am in London I literally read the Guardian purely because I love those typefaces so much I don't even know what the Guardian is except I love the type a few thank yous I want to say thank you to Ian Funnell he actually donated this newspaper and I had kind of heard about this newspaper but never knew much about it he donated this newspaper to the Monotype Archives in Southford Zinglin so it is now there. Elemen Elena I knew I was going to screw her name up Papas I don't know Dan how do you say it Papasissa she actually scanned these images in at very high resolution at the Monotype archive so I could do this presentation and then thank you to Christian Schwartz of commercial type for allowing me to use their typeface so I just wanted to say thank you guys so much