Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, mid-1960s where, in my quest for a degree in journalism, I am required to take a course in typography. It would turn out be a trip into the bowels of prejudice and the closest thing to religious-sanctioned torture and execution since the Spanish Inquisition.
The assignment was simple enough – design a Christmas card.
Do I reach into the vast stores of Baskerville Old Face and dream up a cheesy rhyme having to do with winter wonderlands and peace on Earth?
Or do I do something out of the box before the phrase had ever been invented?
Since there was a movement in those days exhorting people to “put Christ back in Christmas” I started there. I designed. I laid out. I inked and printed and folded and handed it in.
It was the very next day when the first rumbles of thunder started. I was summoned to the inner sanctum of the course leader to explain my work. With him were an assistant dean and stern looking woman for effect.
“What the Hell is this?” the course leader roared waving my project in the air. His companions said the same, silently, with narrow slits to their eyes.
My project had apparently been noticed, but not for the right reasons. My brain scrambled around in ricochet fashion saying Homer-like things like: deny everything. But it was mine and I was proud of it.
On the cover it said:
And when you opened it:
Clarendon Condensed if I remember correctly. 48-point.
And the looks I was getting indicated the panel were not good at visual puns and recognising irony.
This is close to blasphemy, I was told. This was making a mockery of religion. This was not done in the spirit of the assignment.
Now LSU is not a religious institution, unless you count football worship, but here I was in the Bible-belt South and I was dissing the Lord and that apparently makes it a capital crime, just like the Inquisition.
There was further talk about disciplinary action, even expulsion, for these were the days before rights had been invented.
I decided to take the intellectual way out with mock indignation. Obviously, I said, my creation had been misunderstood, for anyone with a knowledge of early Christianity would know that X was an early form of what has evolved into the cross we know now. In fact, some early Christians even used it as a Roman X to disguise the fact they were Christians. It was intended as an ironic card – a visual pun lampooning the current overuse of the Let’s put Christ back in Christmas mantra. I think I may have leaned on the US Constitution too, citing freedom of speech.
It must have worked because I’m still here today to tell the tale rather than being burned at the stake, or disemboweled.
And to this day I have never used anything I learned in typography class, except a hatred of Times New Roman.