I’m no expert on typography, just a fan, so in the course of researching and writing Death of a Typographer I educated myself by reading many books about type. I spent months in the Redmond Barry Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria, sitting in the typography section, browsing through a great selection of …
Author Archives: nickowriter
A few books of the year
I’ve managed to get through quite a few books in 2019 – about 40, I reckon, not including ones I left unfinished for whatever reason (just couldn’t plough through As A Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo, which tbh I only attempted for the title alone.) Some of my reading highlights of 2019 are listed …
Fonts and fiction
(First published in the Victorian Writer magazine, October 2019) The first type I cared about was produced by my parents’ Remington Quiet-Riter, a 1950s machine on which I smashed out my earliest stories as a child. The not-really-very-Quiet-Riter, laughably described as ‘portable’ although it weighed roughly the same as the family car, was a staple …
The multigeneric novel
So, what kind of novel is it? That’s a question that throws me. Yes, my books might look and sound like crime novels. But I’ve never felt completely at home in the genre, and with Death of a Typographer, even less so – notwithstanding the blood-stained punctuation mark on the cover. There are good reasons …
Interview in the Sunday Age
I was interviewed by Thuy On for the Sunday Age and the Sydney Morning Herald about my novel Death of a Typographer. Thuy is a fan of the book, which she describes as “a romp of a book, sprightly and erudite”. We had a lovely chat about fonts, fiction and typography – you can read …
Obsession. Murder. Fonts.
My new novel, Death of a Typographer, a murder mystery about type, was published in September 2019 by Australian Scholarly Publishing. You can order it here. It includes more than 30 fonts, excellent typography, and 300 pages of tasty nutritious fiction. Thuy On in The Sunday Age called it “a romp of a book, sprightly …
Nick Gadd - author 