A Typographic Quest, Number Six, ‘etcetera’ – Westvaco, Carl Dair, 1968

Edition number six, ‘etcetera’, is the last in the series A Typographic Quest and was published a few months after Carl Dair’s untimely death in September 1967. Etcetera simply means ‘and the rest‘. It is typically used to indicate that there are more items, often too numerous to mention, that should be included or considered. Dair likely chose the name because this edition deals largely with the many small tasks that, for some unknown reason, he called ‘joe jobs’. Today, instead of ‘joe jobs’, we would refer to them as those never-ending details that if handled properly, will transform an amateurish job into a professional one.

Important as all those details may be, Dair goes one step further to point out that if you should find that the original idea itself is not working, then rethink it, or even abandon it. He recommends not wasting time trying to ‘fix’ all those details if the original concept is flawed. Unfortunately, Dair neglects to mention that learning how to identify a concept that does not work is one of the most difficult things to learn!