Confessions of a Public Speaker

Colophon

The cover image is a composite of two photos from iStock and Corbis. The cover font is ITC Franklin Gothic. The text font is Sabon; the heading font is BentonSans. The paper for these fine pages is 50-pound Crème, a perfect blend of moderate porosity (air permeability of less than 15 centimeters per minute), delightful compressibility, and high-performance ink hold-out ratios, well suited for confessional and memoir monographs.

And thus, in a few simple sentences, you have now read the greatest, most miraculous colophon of all time.

You see, what you can’t possibly know is that once upon a time, one score and 17 years ago, in a galaxy not at all far away, on a planet indistinguishable from the one you are on now, it was a dark time for colophons. Few knew what colophons were for, nor who wrote them. Billions of people finished books every year, denied the sacred knowledge of what kind of paper had been in their hands and what typefaces they’d read, and fell into suicidal levels of depression. It was a dark time indeed.

But that year something happened. The greatest colophonist of all time was born. Her powers were so far beyond mortal comprehension, they called her the chosen one.

She could identify fonts in 6-point type, while blindfolded and standing on one foot, from several hundred miles away. With barely a sniff from her perfect little nose, she could name the inks used on even the oldest pages known to man. With the slightest touch of her pinkie finger, and the thinnest ...