There was a delightful intersection of two of my favorite things in my mailbox this week. Fontshop sent their newsletter celebrating summer camp with some Badges to be earned - not Girl Scout, but Type Scout, or something such. I am a collector of many things, but fonts and letters are high on my list. I've toyed with my own Badges sent to friends and colleagues in the past.

Fontshop's discs are meant to celebrate their typefaces, but I think they might do very well to just honor special non-alphabetic character traits :

The pared down camp life is so appealing in print. I remember with little fondness damp and bug bites, mystery slime on many things. But I can conjure the smells of the woods and the special quiet that comes with no internet, bad phone reception and transistor radios in the distance broadcasting the sounds of summer baseball. We have spent many summers on a lake in upstate New York where the neighbors are cellists. The sounds of them practicing was lovely, even if the electric range cooking and burned barbeque was not.

It amuses me that the same word is used for that summer camp experience of timelessness (until July 4th) and for the over-the-top camp that Susan Sontag wrote about. The lighthearted vogue for the summer camp aesthetic of worn paint, canvas and loose oars is actually pleasantly campy. I am going to fill some mason jars with flowering weeds for the Fourth of July table - featuring local fabulous Korean fried chicken.