Public Radio International program "To the Best of Our Knowledge" recently devoted an hour to type.

Listen to the episode here.

SEGMENT 1:
The style of type used by the Obama campaign is called Gotham and was designed by the team of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. They tell Anne Strainchamps how they feel about having designed the font of Hope and Change and where the design originally came from.

Also, novelist Nicholson Baker (who reviewed the Kindle, Amazon's electronic reading device, in The New Yorker in an article called "A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve the Book?") tells Anne Strainchamps that e-readers have some advantages over the printed book, but the Kindle isn't his favorite.

SEGMENT 2:
Matthew Carter designed Verdana, the internet font, and co-founded Bitstream, the first digital foundry. He co-designed Helvetica -- the most ubiquitous font family in the world. He even designed Bell Centennial, the phone book font. Carter tells Steve Paulson his career in fonts began very traditionally, at a printing factory.

SEGMENT 3:
Tracy Honn, director of the Silver Buckle Press in Madison, WI, takes TTBOOK's Charles Monroe-Kane and Caryl Owen on a tour of this working museum of letterpress printing, and its star, The Trolley: a Golding Official #6 from the late 1800s. Also, Kitty Burns Florey is the author of "Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting." She says handwriting is the original font and talks with Jim Fleming about practicing Palmer method.