Justin Howes will give an account of the fierce debates which greeted the appearance of sans serif letterforms on London posters and store-fronts between 1803 and 1805. On this subject, Howes says "the topic emerged as a result of hunting down Updike's 1918 joke about the 'Fashionable Egyptian Sign-boards' that had quite shocked polite taste in London a century earlier. Howes is a British typographer, type designer and historian - The Grolier Club, New York - March 9, 2004