Capital v. Vanity

No magazine prides itself more on the chic, the utter modernity of its readers than Editor Frank Crowninshield's glossy smartchart Vanity Fair. In its blithe, monthly blurbs Vanity Fair pictures its subscribers as impeccably draped ladies and gentlemen in rhomboidal furniture, who sigh with appreciation at the dissonances of Darius Milhaud and will scarcely trouble themselves to look at painting earlier than that of Amadeo Modigliani.

Anxious that the layout and typography of Vanity Fair should be as neoteric as the rest of the magazine, Editor Crownin-shield engaged the services of one Mehemed Fehmy Agha, Russo-Turkish designer (TIME, Sept. 30).

Designer Agha ruled that thenceforth headlines and picture captions would be devoid of capital letters. The capital letter was obviously an obsolete and needless convention; its omission was indubitably swank, European, thoroughly in keeping with the foreign spirit of the magazine. For five issues, therefore, Vanity Fair appeared with such captions as the following: eva le gallienne . . . the director of the civic repertory plays Juliet in her own production, with Jacob benami as romeo.

Great was the bewilderment last week when persons discovered, upon opening the March issue, that the capital letter had been reinstated. Fearfully they thumbed the pages for an explanation. Was Vanity Fair now in pursuit of normalcy? Was the arbiter elegantiarum permitting itself the shiny pants of ordinary life?

The observers discovered, in place of the customary monthly blurb, a page headed a note on typography, A NOTE ON TYPOGRAPHY, A Note on Typography. There they read statements which further discomfited them. Said the note, among other things: "A title set entirely in small letters is unquestionably more attractive than one beginning with a capital or with every word beginning with a capital, but, at the present time, it is also unquestionably harder to read because the eye of the reader is not yet educated to it. The issue is thus one between attractiveness and legibility, or between form and content, and Vanity Fair, not wishing to undertake a campaign of education, casts its vote by returning to the use of capital letters in titles, to legibility, and to the cause of content above form. . . . The notes on this page are . . . to reaffirm some old pledges of Vanity Fair and to submit to the final tribunal of its readers the credo of present policies."

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