The book also zeros in on the much-despised Arial, Microsoft’s Helvetica lookalike. And it makes the interesting point that it has proved difficult to protect fonts in court, since an alphabet can be regarded as being in the public domain. But for anyone with the patience and wherewithal to do so, each letter, number and glyph can be individually copyrighted. And Arial, in Mr. Garfield’s opinion, turns out to have enough tiny deliberate changes from Helvetica to make them as different as pineapple and mango.

Among the many other matters of interest in this bright little book: how the @ sign is named in different languages (it’s a rollmop herring to the Czechs, an escargot to the French); the rock ’n’ roll secrets of Rolling Stone magazine’s big, shaded “R” and the Beatles’ lowered “T”; the dark biographical stories behind designers of some of the cleanest-looking fonts (as with Eric Gill and his Gill Sans); how Gotham helped win the presidency in 2008 because it was “a type chosen consciously to suggest forward thinking without frightening the horses”; and the worst fonts in the world.

One of these is seen throughout the movie “Avatar” and on at least one T-shirt that James Cameron wore while directing it. So what looks like Papyrus didn’t get into that movie by accident. This story didn’t get into Mr. Garfield’s sparkling book by accident either.