A case of sans serif to sans Sharif

Being ‘done in’ by a typeface has all the makings of a Sherlock Holmes case, but more Benedict Cumberbatch than Jeremy Brett. Clearly, those scouring the reams of documents connected with the Panama Papers have Sherlockian instincts. Divining that a document handed in by the family of the Prime Minister of Pakistan purporting to be from 2006 could not possibly have been written in a font that became commercially available only the year after, is quintessential Holmes. After all, the great Victorian era detective not only “wrote” a monograph on “The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime”, he analysed the peculiarities of that instrument’s keyboard to home in on the diabolical felon in A Case of Identity (1891), four decades before the FBI began scrutinising documents as a matter of course in crime detection.

More confounding, however, is the fact that the individuals who helped the Sharif family to allegedly fabricate those documents did not take into account the need to properly “age” them, even if they were virtual and not printed on actual parchment. The simple act of switching to Times Roman would have done the trick. The irony of a situation in which a popular sans serif font becomes the possible cause for Pakistan’s government becoming sans Sharif would most certainly have tickled the scribe in Dr Watson.