Typographic Rivers: A Curious Case of Accidental Alignment

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the spaces between words in printed text coincidentally align to form vertical 'rivers' of whitespace? This phenomenon, most common in monospaced fonts with full justification, is generally avoided by typographers due to its distracting nature. The article cites a classic 12-line example discovered in 1988 and a collection from 1986, highlighting the intriguing randomness of this typographic quirk.