Don’t quote me on it, but my wife’s gone droopy

An international controversy has been raging from Ipswich to California. Self-confessed stick-in-the-mud Peter Eaves of Ipswich has a wife called – not surprisingly – Mrs Eaves, who happens to be development director at multimedia consultancy Real Time St

An international controversy has been raging from Ipswich to California.

Self-confessed stick-in-the-mud Peter Eaves of Ipswich has a wife called – not surprisingly – Mrs Eaves, who happens to be development director at multimedia consultancy Real Time Studio. She is a previous Diary star (DW 7 June) due to Californian designer Zuzana Licko, who by a bizarre coincidence designed a font called Mrs Eaves.

But Mr Eaves has been having a tough time of it since Mrs Eaves – he calls her Annie – became a typeface.

He’s got a problem with the font’s quotation marks. “Why are the open quotes upside down? Is this some arcane typographic device?” Mr Eaves asks Licko through e-mail. He thinks they look “droopy” this way.

Licko replies: “I think quotes look droopy when the heavy part is on the bottom, that’s why I put the heavy part on top. To me, traditional quotes simply look upside down. It just goes to show how subjective perception is.”

Petty though the debate seems, Mr Eaves has been taken seriously and Licko’s next e-mail says she plans a special extended ligature font set which will provide each version.

Licko’s response comes as a great relief, according to Annie. “He was absolutely incensed over the issue,” she reveals.

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