Out of Left Field by Ellen Klages

Author:Ellen Klages
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

19

Flopnik-land

We got Hostess CupCakes from the breadbox—my mom might not bake much, but she was pretty good at shopping—and went up to the attic. When Suze moved to the city, she’d taken a lot of her books, but Dewey was all the way across the country and had left most of hers behind. Shipping them was expensive, and MIT had a pretty good library.

Sure enough, we found a really old book—from 1917—called Freehand Lettering for Engineers. It had tiny print and even the pictures looked boring to me, but Jules flipped through the pages and smiled. “All right! That’s the same as Kilgallen’s.”

“I guess for lettering, it doesn’t matter what kind of scientist you are,” I said.

“Probably not,” Jules agreed. “This shows exactly how to draw each letter and number, with the height and the spacing. Everything I need.” She turned another page and let out a whoop. “Look. Your sister even left a bunch of practice sheets.” She showed me some mimeographed pages, the purple ink a little faded, with identical rectangles full of dotted-line letters that reminded me of kindergarten alphabets.

“That’ll help?”

“It’s perfect. Can I take this home?”

“Sure. I think there may be even more lettering junk.” I rooted around in Dewey’s old desk and found a ruler, a wooden triangle, and a metal alphabet stencil. “Hey. You could just use this,” I said, holding up the stencil. “All your letters will be the same, automatically.”

“That feels like cheating.” Jules frowned. “I’m not going to welch on a deal.”

“Okay.” I put the stencil back. “Take the rest, though. They’ll keep your lines straight, once you’ve run out of practice sheets.”

“Those’ll be useful.” Jules looked as happy as if I’d given her a box of toys. I started to kid her about being so weird she got excited about homework, then remembered that I’d been jumping up and down at the idea of spending the afternoon in the library, and shut up.

We went downstairs. “What’s all that?” Mom asked.

Jules explained.

“Ah, inclined Gothic,” Mom said. “I had to learn it, too, back in the day. In fact—” She opened the book to the inside cover and pointed to a name in blue ink: M. Weiss, 414 Schaefer Hall. “This was mine, in college. I passed it on to Dewey.” She handed it back to Jules. “Nice to know it’s still serviceable.”

“And how,” Jules said, and tucked it into her binder.

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