Inappropriate symbols

In an open letter Microsoft Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky has apologised for his company’s offensive behavoir.

He wasn’t writing about Microsoft bullying its competitors or designing bloated software, but the unintentional oversight of failing to identify, prior to the release of a symbol font included in MS Office, that two swastikas were included in it. With the apology, Microsoft is offering a free tool to find and remove the naughty font from your computer. More about this, and the complex meanings of the swastika, at typographica and MetaFilter.

I don’t have the offensive Microsoft font, but I’ll happily substitute a swastika from A book of signs by Rudolph Koch. First published in English by the First Edition Club in 1930, with delicious woodcuts by Fritz Kredel, the book was later widely sold in a fine paperback edition by Dover. I bought my copy in London in 1973 — sadly, it has gone missing from my shelves. Koch’s signs have recently been made into a set of fonts by the P22 type foundry.