The Book Strikes Back

There's been lots about the eBook revolution recently. Amazon are trying to persuade us that eBooks dominate Xmas 2011 sales - but that's largely because they want to promote their Kindle eBook reader. But if you keep your eye on bricks and mortar bookshops you'll see that print publishers are starting to fight back. What weapons are they using? Well, the old-fashioned production values of typographic style, eye-catching graphic design, and physical desirability. The book is becoming once again an object of desire. If you look at an example such as Alexandra Harris's recent Romantic Moderns you'll see that her publishers Thames and Hudson have commissioned good designers to create aesthetically pleasing jacket covers, they use patterns for the end papers inside the book, choose thick creamy paper for their pages, use a stylish font for the body text, add lots of wide margins and leading, plus full colour photographs and illustrations. The result is a book you haven't seen for ages - something that is pleasing to hold, feel, look at, and own.

Talking about Design

John Berry is the former editor and publisher of U&lc (Upper and lower case) the prestigious and influential typographical journal, and he has won awards for his book designs. This is a collection of short articles on graphic design he wrote for the portal web site Creativepro.com. I first came across this book when it was announced that, in common with many other authors in the digital age, John Berry was giving the book away free of charge as a PDF download. I grabbed a copy, saw it was an attractive production, and immediately ordered a printed version from Amazon. By the time I had finished reading the first few chapters, I also ordered its sister production dot-font: Talking About Fonts.... more >>

The Fundamentals of Typography

I like books explaining typography, because they are forced to illustrate the points they are making, and the result is usually pages with plenty of visual interest. That's what makes books such as Eric Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep and James Felici's Manual of Typography so popular. This book covers similar ground in a historically comprehensive fashion. Its first part is devoted to the development of language and the history of writing systems. This shows the gradual evolution of alphabets and the gestation of what we now call typefaces or font families. These expand after the invention of printing in the Renaissance then explode into a galaxy of styles following industrialisation. Gavin Abrose and Paul Harris trace this development in particular detail during the second part of the last century, following each step of recent digital ... Read more >>

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A 2 Z and More Signs

This is a compilation of the best-selling albumns of quirky typography, 130 Alphabets and Other Signs and A B Z: More Alphabets and Other Signs, with new materials added. Basically, it's a sample book of fonts, characters, trademarks, logos, and what we would now call dingbats. But what gives the book its remarkable attractiveness is that the collection is both eclectic and suffused with a period charm of the inter-war years. Many of the designs and fonts are drawn from that period - with more than a hint of colonial nostalgia in labels from products destined for Africa, China, and India. Even the pages are printed in a pre-faded manner and cut with rounded corners to enhance this effect ... Read more >>

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