> Strangely enough, the name of this typeface is barely known even among die-hard fans.
This doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I’m a fan of many books and I don’t know the name of any of the typefaces. I think it’s funny that this author links fandom for fonts to fandom for Dune and thinks people interested in Dune are also interested in typefaces.
I like this article and was curious about the distinctive “dune font.” But not enough to Google it in the past 40 years.
To be honest, the same sentence caught my eye. I can imagine there are some fans of both Dune and Typography. But it's more probable that it's due to some effect I've been observing for a while. Not sure if it has a name, all these pieces of Internet wisdom have a name, like "Gell-Man Amnesia", "Godwin's Law"... maybe I could call it narag's effect?
I mean that any YouTube channel or Instagram account, that has some niche topic as focus, tend to greatly exagerate what is considered a normal engagement with such topic.
As an example, most persons own one watch and one perfume, if any. If you want to buy a new wristwatch or perfume and do your little research, you'll find reviewers that own hundreds of perfumes or dozens of watches, some of them ridiculously expensive. Why? You can create a channel that helps the viewers to choose their one and only cheap purchase, but good luck monetizing that. You need recurring visitors, to improve your watching times. Brand deals also require you are able to send whales to the vendors.
The noble art of Typography and a blog seem a little too sober of a setup to fit that description, but who knows, I'm sure there are pros very passionate about typesetting.
Munroe's Law of Average Familiarity: Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.
The book is fairly well known generally, I think. But speaking only for myself, I've been involved with amateur typesetting for some time, and at this point find myself something of a font geek, and as someone who owned the Putnam paperbacks I was immediately interested in the topic.
I take an interest in typography (have read a few books on the subject), and read the entire "Dune" series, but never learned about the typeface on the covers.
This doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I’m a fan of many books and I don’t know the name of any of the typefaces. I think it’s funny that this author links fandom for fonts to fandom for Dune and thinks people interested in Dune are also interested in typefaces.
I like this article and was curious about the distinctive “dune font.” But not enough to Google it in the past 40 years.