Hanging on the Colophon

By Jon Foro

What's in a logo? With MIT Press, apparently more than I realized.

Scorsese's new flick, Shutter Island, put me in the mood to browse one of last year's creepier books, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals--published by MIT and written up in this space in October of last year.

Now, I've seen the MIT colophon thousands of times over the years, stamped on spines of books I'll never be smart enough to read. But today it hit me that it's not just a classy little icon, but it actually represents the letters MITP. It's the P, for Press, that had made it such an uncrackable code all that time. It took three seconds to confirm this at the MIT Press blog, and to discover that:

• It was created in 1963 by Media Lab designer Muriel Cooper, whose work with early computers greatly influenced user interface design
• Some people mistake it for the Black Flaglogo
• The online MITPTyper application converts a text-string into an MIT-style logo, which is both very cool and possibly useless
• My original title for this post (High Colophonic) had already been scooped

--Jon