Discoveries

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Rumspringa

To Be or Not to Be Amish

Tom Shachtman

North Point Press: 286 pp., $25

THERE are 200,000 Amish in the United States, half of them under 18. Most end their formal education at 14 and begin the period the Amish call rumspringa, or “running around outside the bounds.” Tom Shachtman’s account of these teenagers’ efforts to decide whether to be baptized into the Amish church opens among Indiana cornfields, with a typical group of Amish kids. The parents have pretended to go to bed. Some of the girls gather at a friend’s house and put a gas lamp in the window to let the boys know they’re ready to party. In cars, not buggies, the boys take them to a local gas station/convenience store, where they change into jeans and T-shirts and whip out cellphones and CD players and cigarettes. Many experiment with drugs (crystal meth, cocaine, marijuana) or alcohol, or both. Weekends are spent partying.

By 18, most of these kids have found a mate and made their decision; more than 80% join the church. They will marry by 21, have their first child in a year (the average Amish family has seven), work for 30 years (many abandon the farm for factories) and retire at 55. The large number of teens who choose to stay Amish, writes Shachtman, who interviewed Amish kids and their families as well as mainstream Americans and specialists on teen psychology, is due in part to fear of leaving the community (and possibly going to hell), but it is also a testament to the Amish way of life, which imparts “a sense of purpose,” something we all hanker for but which may be easier to realize among the Amish than in modern American life.

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An Essay on Typography

Eric Gill

David R. Godine: 188 pp., $11.95 paper

ERIC GILL, typographer, sculptor, stone carver and writer, wrote “An Essay on Typography” in 1930, when he was 48, and revised it six years later. Aside from calling the reader’s attention to typography’s many fascinating aspects -- slant, stroke, shade, margins, spacing and other things we take for granted (all of which can affect whether we fall asleep the minute we start reading or whether we even like to read) -- Gill had a larger agenda.

He was fascinated by the “conflict between industrialism & the ancient methods of handicraftsmen which resulted in the muddle of the 19th century.” He felt passionately that these were two distinct spheres, each with its strength and power. In this essay, he considers the effects of industrialization on the printing process. “That if you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself,” he reasons, “is true in both worlds. The beauty that industrialism properly provides is the beauty of bones; the beauty that radiates from the work of men is the beauty of holiness.”

Gill describes the process of punch-cutting by hand with chisels and gravers versus by machine, where there is a separation of designer and workman so that the workman tends to become “intellectually irresponsible” and the designer “technically incapable.” A book, he writes, should be “pleasantly readable,” by which he means 12 words to the line; “uneven spacing is objectionable,” but uneven length of line isn’t. Too wide a measure means too much head movement. He has specific ideas about margin width as well. The process of creating books should reflect “goodness” and “good living,” not mere mass production. Machines are designed to create perfect products -- and perfection, Gill argues, is an “abnormality.” He insists that there are too many typefaces though acknowledges that he is responsible for five of them, each of which “shouts louder” than the last.

“An Essay on Typography” is the work of a worried visionary at a pivotal moment in history when the industrial and human worlds were colliding. Yet here we are, more than 75 years later, reading his restive, restful essay, our eyes herded across lines of rich type -- here and there a lowercase “e” filled in with ink, a letter floating at the bottom of a page, full-bellied ampersands, nervous contractions and stately paragraph marks, all assuring the flow of meaning through our hearts and minds.