Matt Soar:

Deadwood in Ontario...

I wrote a while back about a sign on Highway 401 that had a peculiar mistake in it - one letter had been mounted backwards. Which brings us to the HBO series Deadwood. Focusing on the premise that life was short - and largely unpleasant - in the new frontier towns of nineteenth century America, Deadwood is a cracking revisiting of the cowboy/western genre. An early episode (S1, E6) about an outbreak of smallpox has the main characters poring over the local newspaperman's page proofs as he inks up in the middle of main street. Anyway, the intentional quirk in the main title (above) is a reversed 'W', which speaks volumes, in the subtlest of ways, about the nature of the muddy, lawless hole in question. Unless I'm mistaken, however, it's nigh on impossible to reverse a letter using letterpress; invert, maybe, but not set backwards. At least not unintentionally. More on this as soon as I find out for sure. First stop will be to check in with the Typophiles.