Starting December with an Annoying Discovery

Early on in the life of this blog (er, 2009), I made the conscious decision to address this exact topic. My mobile device still won't seem to do it...

There's a tiny birdhouse looking cabinet on a post down the street that's one of the Free Tiny Libraries, a "Take-a-book, Leave-a-book" variety that I mentioned last month or the month before. I've been slowly titrating my excess books into it.

The other day we were walking by and Cass decided to take a look. Since he regularly helped me bring books to it, I liked the idea of him being interested in exploring book-dom.

Instantly he saw something he had to have:

This turns out to be the ninth entry in the Animorphs series, and, if you can't see the title (kudos if you can) it's actually called "The Andalite's Gift."

Not to spend too much time on a specific YA title's backstory, but: the Animorphs are a team of four kids, a hawk, and an alien, that fight other aliens and fend off an invasion. When one of the kids touches an animal, they can turn into that animal. If they stay the animal for two hours or more, they can't change back, which is how a hawk is part of the team (poor Toby). The alien is the "andalite" of the title. (Any fans out there? Did I eff this up?)

Anyway, the reason I know any of this is because I started reading the text to the Boy on that particular Sunday, and whenever it seemed like he wasn't listening anymore and I'd stop reading, he'd holler for me to read it "a'geyonn."

(Really, how kids learn language and in the early times do funky things with vowel sounds could be an entire post...sometimes the short 'a' in 'dad' ends up with three vowel changes, and can sound like "daa-ayy-odd," and each time it's the best thing I've ever heard.)

The annoying part, the part that will lead to me more likely putting the book back than keeping it, is this:

Do you see? DO YOU SEE?

It's a sans-serif font. There are no serifs! WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? AN ENTIRE BOOK?

A subway map; okay. An ad insert in a newspaper; sure. Text messages; of course... (look at me, such an old man...not Uber-ing, knowing what a newspaper is, not communicating fully with emojis...)

Serifs are the tiny horizontal lines that adorn the hard edges of the printed letters of our Latin alphabet...well, most of the printed letters found in book-form blocks of texts. Books, newspapers, magazines, scholarly articles and scientific texts will pretty much, by convention, be printed with serif fonts. The websites I read: serif fonts. My own blogs: I try to see to it that they're serif fonted, but I may not yet be at a hundred percent.

It's just easier on the eyes while being more aesthetic.

Please publishers: DO NOT PUBLISH BOOKS WITH SANS-SERIF FONTS.