John F Kennedy regarded excessive use of capital letters as a "tell-tale sign of shabby pomposity". Managers at New Zealand health agency ProCare must have felt the same because, as Simon Garfield reveals in his fascinating book Just My Type (Profile Books), in 2007 it fired an employee for writing an email entirely in capital letters and causing "disharmony in the workplace".

Printers take type seriously (where would they be without it?) – but many companies, organisations and people don’t. Inspired by – and pillaging – Garfield’s tome, this A to Z celebrates typography’s arcane mysteries.

A is for Apollo 11. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on 20 July 1969, they didn’t just take giant steps, plant a flag and collect rock samples. They left behind a plaque inscribed in Futura capitals with the closing words: "We came in peace for all mankind". Paul Renner’s modernist creation was the official Apollo font, an honour that persuaded Stanley Kubrick to use his favourite typeface Futura Extra Bold in the posters and titles for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Renner wouldn’t have been impressed: he detested movies.

B is for bestiality. Genius has always gone its own way but Eric Gill’s relentless sexual experimentation with his daughter, sister and dog ("Continued experiment with dog today" reads one diary entry) led some type designers to consider boycotting Gill Sans. The Church of England has proved more forgiving: choosing this great (and, Garfield observes, "oddly sexless") typeface for its books of Common Worship.

C is for Calibri, the world’s most widely used font and Microsoft’s default font of choice. Dutch typographer Luc(as) only earned a "one-off payment" for Calibri. He decided to design type at school: "Someone had written the page numbers in the school newspaper by hand. I found that very ugly and wanted to do something about it."

D is for drowned. Dove was an elegant font cut for the Dove Press, a private press founded by bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922). Appalled by the idea of bequeathing this font to his former partner Emery Walker, Cobden-Sanderson literally threw it in the Thames. Garfield says it took Cobden-Sanderson three years to chuck the matrices, letters and blocks into the river. He often went out at night, waiting for heavy traffic to mask the splash as the blocks hit the water.

E is for Easy Hill, the mansion near Birmingham where John Baskerville was buried upright in the grounds in 1775. The typographic genius proved, Garfield dryly notes, "a moveable type" – Baskerville’s corpse was found under a pile of gravel in 1827 (the mansion’s new owner had dumped it), secretly interred under a Birmingham churchyard and then transferred, to avoid demolition, to another graveyard.

F is for football. The typeface that won the World Cup was Unity. Used for the lettering on Spain’s shirts, this face was created for Adidas by Brazilian designer Yomar Augusto. He was inspired by the tournament’s Jabulani football. Pity the footballers weren’t.

G is for graffiti, a burgeoning inspiration for type designers seeking street cred. The wonderfully named Bored Schoolboy font resembles the kind of sloppy graffiti type once scrawled on science block walls.

H is for Helvetica. This sans serif typeface, created by Eduard Hoffmann and Max Mieidinger in 1957, is ubiquitous. When, as Garfield recounts, the New York designer Cyrus Highsmith tried to spend a day without Helvetica, he found the font was used on clothes labels, yoghurt cartons, the New York Times, dollar bills and the TV remote. Garfield lauds the font’s honesty, wit and cleanness. Designer and typographer Neville Brody, who used Helvetica widely in the 1980s, says its blandness is chiefly cherished by organisations with "no personality".

I is for Ikea. In August 2009 the store decided to make its typographic identity more consistent and replace Futura, its print front, with Verdana, its web font. Type mavens were incensed – one blog plaintively asked: "Why Verdana, Ikea, why?" The fury was partly driven, Garfield notes, by the fact that "Verdana is linked to something modern and commonly reviled: Microsoft". The impact of this move was widely felt; this typographic switcheroo prompted more Tweets than Teddy Kennedy’s death.

J is for Jonathan Barnbrook, the brilliant, iconoclastic British designer who has proposed such new fonts as Bastard ("for corporate fascists"), Drone ("for text without content") and Nixon ("to tell lies in").

K is for Kylie Minogue who collaborated with New York DJ Towa Tei on the 1998 single German Bold Italic which reached 63 in the charts. The opening lines probably nonplussed the Aussie sex-kitten’s fanbase: "My name is German Bold Italic. I am a typeface."

L is for Los Angeles, one of the fonts a young, enthusiastic calligrapher called Steve Jobs designed for his Macintosh computer in 1984. Los Angeles was one of several fonts designed by Jobs and named after his favourite cities. Garfield says Jobs’ initiative "was the beginning of a seismic shift in our relationship with letters and type."

M is for Mad Men. The ad men in this slick, drama, are, designer Mark Simonson notes on his Typecasting website, "way ahead when it comes to type, using faces that didn’t even exist". The anachronistic anarchy starts with the titles. They are supposed to be in period – the 1960s – yet feature Lucinda Handwriting which didn’t exist until 1992. Simonson has also spotted Balmoral (created in 1978), Bookman Style (1989), Fenice (1980), ITC Kabel (1975) and, worst of all, Zapfino (1998). Scouring a TV show for inappropriate use of Snell Roundhand is geeky, but Simonson still loves Mad Men.

N is for new typefaces. As in: does the world need any? In 1968, the respected Penrose annual asked: "Aren’t we done yet?" As the human eye can perceive differences as small as 1/600th of an inch, there’s certainly scope for new designs. Fashion, technology and a glut of talented type designers suggest we’ll see lots of new fonts (even if many are inspired by old ones). Yet, as typographer Mathew Carter tells Garfield, the risk is "we are slicing the pie thinner and thinner".

O is for oldest typeface. Garfield suggests Textura, the font used by Johannes Gutenberg to imitate the handwritten manuscripts so popular in the 15th century, is the most venerable. But German typographer Herbert E. Brekle reckoned the first example of moveable type is Crete’s mysterious Phaistos clay disc which dates back to 1600-1800BC and is covered with stamped symbols. Brekle argued: "The decisive factor is that the material ‘types’ are proven to be repeatedly instantiated on the clay disc."

P is for presidents. In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign font Gotham, an elegant 21st-century sans serif created by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, symbolized – to many hopeful designers– the change Obama’s presidency promised. Change has since come to America. Typographic change. Obama’s outspoken opponent Sarah Palin, believing that aspiring presidents shouldn’t ignore the Gotham precedent, uses Gotham (and Futura) in her ‘Sarah Pac’ logo.

Q is for ‘quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. This is the pangram (a phrase that contains every letter of the alphabet) used to test typefaces and the inspiration for a YouTube video of – you guessed it – a nifty brown fox jumping over an idle dog.

R is for Russell Crowe, the macho Aussie star of many movies promoted, Garfield notes, with the Trajan font. Created by Carol Twombly for Adobe in 1989, Trajan is modelled on the Roman square capitals in the inscription at the base of emperor Trajan’s column. In Tinseltown, the poster designer’s motto is: "When in doubt, use Trajan". Given the depths of Hollywood’s historical ignorance, it is entirely feasible that Trajan’s use on posters for sword and sandal epics is inspired by the misapprehension that the emperor himself designed the font.

S is for suicide. Printer’s apprentice Gyoergei Szabo was 17 when his girlfriend left him in 1936. The lovelorn Hungarian set his former sweetheart’s name in type and swallowed the lot. Surgeons had to operate.

T is for the extended T in The Beatles ident. Garfield identifies Goudy Old Style as the unconscious inspiration for this iconic logo. Paul McCartney says he drew the elongated T (drum-shop owner Ivo Arbiter and sign painter Eddie Stokes also claim authorship). Created in 1915, the slender, fluid and finely drawn Old Style is the definitive typeface created by American typographer Frederic Goudy. As a man who lived the rock and roll lifestyle – girls, fast cars and music (albeit jazz, not rock) – before the phrase was invented, Goudy might have relished the Beatles’ homage. Mind you, he was a stickler for character form, thoroughly irritated by the American Type Founders version of his ‘q’.

U is for undergrounds. Subways, tubes and metros have inspired, challenged and infuriated typographers. The greatest fusion of type and public transport is the London Underground – still synonymous with Edward Johnston’s typeface Johnston Sans 84 years after the font was designed. Other metropolises have been more fickle. The Paris Metro replaced Alphabet Metro (Adrian Frutiger’s new form of Univers) with Jean Francois Porchez’s Parisine in the 1990s.

V is for Marc Van Wageningen the Dutch deconstructivist and creator of Gagarin, which he calls the "only typeface with its own genealogical register". Named after the iconic cosmonaut, inspired by Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko, the Gagarin type family reflects van Wageningen’s dissatisfaction with typographic rules: "Compared to a real family, a typographic family is a dull show. Where is the criminal nephew?" He went so far as to hire Flemish designer Nele Reyniers to create female Gagarins. The business of typographic gender is controversial. Graphic arts guru Frank Romano once declared: "Real men don’t set Souvenir". Garfield’s suggestion that a "charming, elegant font" like Centaur (used for the female content in Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus) is somehow feminine sounds, to feminists, like sexist stereotyping. The ‘female’ Gagarin faces owe more to the USSR than Venus.

W is for worst font in the world. Which Garfield suggests is the 2012 Olympic typeface, an "uncool font based on jaggedness and crudeness". Yet Comic Sans, the script face designed by Vincent Connare has provoked an online jihad. The Ban Comic Sans website’s motto is "Putting the sans into Comic Sans". The font’s appearance in the Wall Street Journal was cited as a sign of the apocalypse" by type aficionados.

X is for x-height, a crucial measure for any typeface but especially for Transport, the Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert font used on road signs. The type x-heights on British road signs are essentially determined by the speed they are read at. On motorways, the x-height is 400mm. On signs not read by moving vehicles – like those indicating a waiting restriction – the x-height can be as small as 15mm.

Y is for "Yee-hah!" – the only appropriate response to Linotype’s Wild West fonts with such memorable monikers as Giddyup, Ponderosa (after the ranch in Bonanza), and Wanted. Exaggerated types perfect for newspaper headlines – as long as that newspaper is the Tombstone Epitaph circa 1881.

Z is for Zapf Dingbats, a collection of signs and symbols created by the German typographic genius Herman Zapf. In 1994, David Carson, the editor of experimental music magazine RayGun, was so bored by an interview with Bryan Ferry he ran the entire story in Dingbats because it looked more intriguing as a cryptogram.