front cover of Digital Typography
Digital Typography
Donald E. Knuth
CSLI, 1998
In this collection, the second in the series, Knuth explores the relationship between computers and typography. The present volume, in the words of the author, is a legacy to all the work he has done on typography. When he thought he would take a few years' leave from his main work on the art of computer programming, as is well known, the short typographic detour lasted more than a decade. When type designers, punch cutters, typographers, book historians, and scholars visited the University during this period, it gave to Stanford what some consider to be its golden age of digital typography. By the author's own admission, the present work is one of the most difficult books that he has prepared. This is truly a work that only Knuth himself could have produced.
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Glossary of Typesetting Terms
Richard Eckersley, Richard Angstadt, Charles M. Ellertson, and Richard Hendel
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Glossary of Typesetting Terms is an up-to-date reference book on the craft of typography. It organizes a dictionary and a style guide into a single, one-stop resource.

Prepared by a team of leading professionals—a designer, an editor, compositors, and production managers—this glossary will be valuable to anyone who works in publishing or printing for its definitions of typographical terms and concise treatment of typographical style.

The glossary adds important details to discussions of typography that are covered more generally in editorial style guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style. It is indispensable to anyone who prepares text for a living, including those who implement their own typesetting decisions with the aid of word-processing and page-layout software.

This manual furnishes a common technical vocabulary for specialists and nonspecialists alike. More than 900 entries provide up-to-date meanings for traditional terms like kerning,bleed, and thumbnail and definitions of new phrases like global search and replace,H & J (hyphenation and justification), and idiot file that have been developed to describe the role of computer technology in typesetting.

Eight appendixes offer additional guidance. The house style sheets of a major typesetter provide a sample checklist of items that affect the way in which words are composed into professional-quality type. Other appendixes cover families of type, the parts of a book, diagrams of the parts of a letter, coding and marking a manuscript in the precise language of typesetters, writing specifications for tables, proofreaders’ marks, and special characters.

No other reference book makes the vocabulary and practices of contemporary typesetting so accessible.
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Illuminating Letters
Typography and Literary Interpretation
Paul C. Gutjahr
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
What do we read when we read a text? The author's words, of course, but is that all? The prevailing publishing ethic has insisted that typography—the selection and arrangement of type and other visual elements on a page—should be an invisible, silent, and deferential servant to the text it conveys.

This book contests that conventional point of view. Looking at texts ranging from the King James Bible to contemporary comic strips, the contributors to Illuminating Letters examine the seldom considered but richly revealing relationships between a text's typography and its literary interpretation. The essays assume no previous typographic knowledge or expertise; instead they invite readers primarily concerned with literary and cultural meanings to turn a more curious eye to the visual and physical forms of a specific text or genre. As the contributors show, closer inspection of those forms can yield fresh insights into the significance of a text's material presentation, leading readers to appreciate better how presentation shapes understandings of the text's meanings and values.

The case studies included in the volume amplify its two overarching themes: one set explores the roles of printers and publishers in manipulating, willingly or not, the meaning and reception of texts through typographic choices; the other group examines the efforts of authors to circumvent or subvert such mediation by directly controlling the typographic presentation of their texts. Together these essays demonstrate that choices about type selection and arrangement do indeed help to orchestrate textual meaning.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Sarah A. Kelen, Beth McCoy, Steven R. Price, Leon Jackson, and Gene Kannenberg Jr.
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Letters of Light
Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design
J.R. Osborn
Harvard University Press, 2017

Arabic script remains one of the most widely employed writing systems in the world, for Arabic and non-Arabic languages alike. Focusing on naskh—the style most commonly used across the Middle East—Letters of Light traces the evolution of Arabic script from its earliest inscriptions to digital fonts, from calligraphy to print and beyond. J. R. Osborn narrates this storied past for historians of the Islamic and Arab worlds, for students of communication and technology, and for contemporary practitioners.

The partnership of reed pen and paper during the tenth century inaugurated a golden age of Arabic writing. The shape and proportions of classical calligraphy known as al-khatt al-mansub were formalized, and variations emerged to suit different types of content. The rise of movable type quickly led to European experiments in printing Arabic texts. Ottoman Turkish printers, more sensitive than their European counterparts to the script’s nuances, adopted movable type more cautiously. Debates about “reforming” Arabic script for print technology persisted into the twentieth century.

Arabic script continues to evolve in the digital age. Programmers have adapted it to the international Unicode standard, greatly facilitating Arabic presence online and in word processing. Technology companies are investing considerable resources to facilitate support of Arabic in their products. Professional designers around the world are bringing about a renaissance in the Arabic script community as they reinterpret classical aesthetics and push new boundaries in digital form.

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Recasting a Craft
St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization
Robert A. Mullen
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, type for newspapers and books was set one letter at a time, and the manufacturers of the metal type used in the printing trade were called typefounders. This prominent yet rarely documented industry was essential to the development of modern American publishing and was particularly prevalent in St. Louis. In Recasting a Craft: St. Louis Typefounders Respond to Industrialization, Robert A. Mullen recognizes the city’s significant contributions to typefounding and details how the craft fundamentally changed through mechanization, growth, and the creation of a large conglomerate.

Like many trades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were eventually lost to industrialization, the typefoundries of St. Louis grew from small shops to factories with organized labor. Mullen describes three distinct periods of the industry that emerged in St. Louis’s typefounding trade: the early struggles in establishing the industry there, the period of intense competition and creative enterprise, and the proliferation of new companies that appealed to those customers who felt alienated by the monopolizing older companies.

Mullen discusses at length the technological, social, and demographic foundations of the immense growth of the trade in the nineteenth century, identifying the changes in typographical design and the demand for it in the new era of advertising. He also profiles the workers, working conditions, and labor issues—such as the failed industry-wide strike of 1903—that emerged as the craft of typefounding entered the industrial age. More than two hundred type designs that originated with the St. Louis firms are listed in an appendix with examples of each face. The volume also contains a list of the catalogs of the St. Louis typefoundries known to exist in the public and academic libraries of the United States.

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The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection
A History and Catalog
David Shields
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 50 Books | 50 Covers Award, The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)
2024 Honorable Mention, Design Awards, Graphis
2024 Finalist, Typography Competition, Communication Arts Magazine

A beautifully illustrated exploration of the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection.


The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type manufactured and used for printing in nineteenth-century America. Comprising nearly 150 typefaces of various sizes and styles, it was amassed by noted design educator and historian Rob Roy Kelly starting in 1957 and is now held by the University of Texas. Although Kelly himself published a 1969 book on wood type and nineteenth-century typographic history, there has been little written about the creation of the wood type forms, the collection, or Kelly.

In this book, David Shields rigorously updates and expands upon Kelly’s historical information about the types, clarifying the collection’s exact composition and providing a better understanding of the stylistic development of wood type forms during the nineteenth century. Using rich materials from the period, Shields provides a stunning visual context that complements the textual history of each typeface. He also highlights the non-typographic material in the collection—such as borders, rules, ornaments, and image cuts—that have not been previously examined. Featuring over 300 color illustrations, this written history and catalog is bound to spark renewed interest in the collection and its broader typographic period.

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Type is Beautiful
The Story of Fifty Remarkable Fonts
Simon Loxley
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
Fonts are everywhere. You may even have a favorite serif or sans serif. But have you ever wondered who took the bold steps to create it? Behind every great font is a great story, and, in this fascinating cultural history, graphic designer and design writer Simon Loxley covers more than five hundred years in the history of typography—from the oldest printed typeface used in the Gutenberg Bible right up to the present day.

Type is Beautiful traces the history of fifty remarkable fonts. Thoroughly researched and visually exciting, it takes readers through the story of each font’s creation and distinct characteristics, as well as why it succeeded or failed. Some of the fonts were commissioned for major commercial or cultural projects. Edward Johnston’s iconic Johnston Sans, for instance, was created for the London Underground and remained there exclusively until a redesign in the 1980s. Other fonts became culturally significant unintentionally. The designer of the controversial Comic Sans created the typeface to fill the need for a font to fit the speech bubbles for a Microsoft program, never expecting it to become one of the world’s favorite—and most-maligned—fonts. Along the way, Loxley gives readers an unforgettable cast of characters, including Johannes Gutenberg, William Caslon, Nicolas Jenson, Stanley Morison, William Morris, and Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, the English artist and bookbinder who famously “bequeathed” the unique metal type created for his failed Doves Press to the Thames, casting the type into the river to prevent its future use.

Brimming with fascinating facts, Type is Beautiful is a highly informative and entertaining trip through a lesser-known aspect of history that turns out to have major significance for print and design culture. From Blackletter to Baskerville and Bodoni, you will find yourself looking at fonts with a newfound appreciation.
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Typography
Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Harvard University Press, 1989

The relationships between philosophy and aesthetics and between philosophy and politics are especially pressing issues today. Those who explore these themes will applaud the publication—for the first time in English—of this important collection, one that reveals the scope and force of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s reflections on mimesis, subjectivity, and representation in philosophical thought.

This coherent and rigorous body of work reflects the author’s complex and subtle treatment of mimesis in the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger. It contains close critical analyses of works by Plato, Diderot, Hölderlin, Reik, Girard, and Heidegger, and moves through topics such as music, autobiography, tragedy, and the problem of historical and political self-definition.

Because Lacoue-Labarthe deals with issues that cross disciplinary lines, his work will appeal to readers interested in philosophy as it relates to politics, history, and aesthetics, especially literature. By showing that the concept of mimesis is an integral part of philosophical reasoning, he provides a challenging approach to many of Heidegger’s ideas, and contributes to the poststructuralist (or postmodem) attempt to rethink the notions of reference and representation. This approach challenges readers to redefine their understanding of history and politics.

One of the most gifted and active of the younger French philosophers, Lacoue-Labarthe is a respected peer of Jacques Derrida, who has provided an extensive introduction to the book especially for American readers. Those who are familiar with Derrida’s writings will appreciate the opportunity to see his questions approached in an entirely different style by Lacoue-Labarthe, resulting in productive new insights.

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front cover of Weekly Newspaper Makeup and Typography
Weekly Newspaper Makeup and Typography
Thomas Barnhart
University of Minnesota Press, 1949
Weekly Newspaper Makeup and Typography by Thomas F. Barnhard is written primarily for the professional field - for editors and publishers of newspapers. The result is a how-to-do-it volume that will also prove extremely helpful to beginning publishers and the students of weekly journalism. Its material has been tried and tested in courses in typography over a period of 18 years.This is the only full-length book on the subject. It contains 17 chapters: the rise of functional modernism, front page makeup, inside page makeup, editorial and feature pages, rural correspondence, school pages, society pages, sports pages, classified advertising pages, tabloid newspapers, standard headlines, semi-modern headlines, newspaper body type, printing. Of special interest is a chapter on changing processes in printing newspapers. The book is illustrated with actual reproductions, headlines - all selected for their value in interpreting the spirit and character of the small-town press.
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