There’s an Epidemic of Upside-Down Letters!
And it goes way beyond Frank Lloyd Wright. Plus more butter color-coding and a new Inconspicuous News Roundup.
Hello! As you may recall, I recently did a deep-dive investigation on how the signage at a famous Frank Lloyd Wright building has a long and inexplicable history of being afflicted with upside-down letters.
And here’s the thing: If it can happen to Frank Lloyd Wright, it can happen to anyone. It turns out that there are lots of other buildings out there with inverted letters, so I want to take a look at some of those today.
Let’s start with this photo, sent in by reader Alan Rutherford, showing an apartment building on Northeast Glisan Street in Portland, Oregon:
Yipes! The large-scale lettering makes that inverted “N” seem particularly egregious. You’d think it would be hard to miss, and yet the work crew that was installing the lettering somehow managed to bungle it. (If you’ve always wanted to live in a building with a huge upside-down “N,” look here.)
As it happens, upside-down “N”s, with the telltale serif at lower right instead of upper left, are among the most common inverted letters, and they sometimes end up in surprisingly prominent places. For 26 years there was one on a sign welcoming drivers on Interstate 25 to the city of Colorado Springs: