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Booksthe world. It’s only one example ofWaugh, the tepid war reporter, nothaving a clue and not trying very hardto get one.Former journalist John MaxwellHamilton writes in his insightful introductionthat “The problem was Waughdisdained journalism work.” Hamilton,dean of Louisiana State University’sManship School of Mass Communication,writes that the atmosphere inAddis Ababa in the run-up to the warproved perfect for someone wishing to“ridicule rather than understand.”And this general disregard for theprofessional task is the book’s importance.It’s a warning to modernreporters and readers. Waugh and thegaggle of reporters who covered theItalian invasion of Ethiopia traffickedin rumor with the voice of authority.(Waugh mocks this failing then commitsthe sin repeatedly himself throughouthis book.) They discussed battles andtroop movements with no idea ofwhere, or if, they had taken place. (Onejournalist made up an entire battle.)“Scoop” was written to cast these absurditiesinto sharp relief. In many ways,“Waugh in Abyssinia”—the novelist’sattempt to produce serious reportage—accomplishesthe same end.Today foreign reporting is much betterthan in Waugh’s day—if for no otherreason than technology and globalcompetition have made it more difficultfor mendacity to stand as long as it oncedid. Yet Waugh’s approach to foreignreporting has never fully left us. Westill have our William Boots. RecentlyI heard a foreign correspondent askedabout reporting from Darfur. He saidit was awful: He couldn’t find a decenthotel near the refugee camps.Evelyn Waugh’s book can’t be readwithout thinking of today’s wars andhow reporters cover them. “Waugh inAbyssinia” puts the reports of insurgentdeaths in Iraq or the capture of a “senior”Taliban commander in context.Think of the snarky Waugh, pen inone hand, cocktail in the other, jottingdown his report as he sat miles fromthe battlefront.The “From Our Own Correspondent”series states its purpose as follows:“illuminating the development offoreign news gathering at a time whenit has never been more important.”Its first book is an excellent choice,illuminating the noble profession’sinherent weaknesses. Cameron McWhirter, a 2007 NiemanFellow, is a reporter for The AtlantaJournal-Constitution. He once freelancedin Eritrea and Ethiopia, andhe says he took great measures toavoid other journalists while there.Type Creates a Visual Signature for Newspapers‘In a marketplace where content and quality once drove consumer decisions, the newspaper nowcompetes visually in a design-savvy, 24-hour free-information age.’From Gutenberg to OpenType: An Illustrated History of Type from theEarliest Letterforms to the Latest Digital FontsRobin DoddHartley and Marks Publishers. 192 Pages. $29.95 pb.By Ally PalmerType is a strange thing. Even as youread this you shouldn’t be aware ofthe chosen font or the shapes of theindividual characters or their size andthe space between the lines. All thosethings have been taken care of so theexperience of absorbing the informationcan be as pleasurable and seamlessas possible. However, now that it hasbeen mentioned you can’t help butbe aware of it and wonder just why itis important.Like many things, typesetting andtype design have undergone a transformationduring the past 20 years. Theadvent of desktop publishing—and, inparticular, the arrival of Apple’s Macintoshcomputer—was a quantum leapfor the publishing industry. In fact theMac is what gave me the opportunityin 1986 to work in an industry I hadnot even considered until then, whenas an unemployed musician I found ajob at a new music magazine, Cut, inEdinburgh, Scotland. A local publisherowned a new Mac Plus and quickly wesaw the potential to produce a magazinewith limited up-front cost.Viewed from where we are today, thiswas a primitive machine; but its biggestproblem was the limited amount of typeavailable. There were Times, Palatino,Helvetica, Optima and a few others. Allperfectly functional, readable fonts, butnot the inspiring selection we neededto create a youthful music publication.Instead we resorted to using Letraset,a dry transfer type, for headlines. Thiswas a painfully slow, laborious process,but working with it gave me a crucialinsight into the subtleties of handlingtype and the importance of such arcanematters as word and letter spacing.As the Macintosh became more powerfuland design and layout softwaresuch as PageMaker and Quark Xpressbecame more sophisticated, those ofus using it to create pages for publica-Nieman Reports / Fall 2007 93