Just my type: a book about fonts - Garfield, Simon
Summary: A romp through the history of fonts and the lives of the great typographers, revealing the extent to which fonts are not only shaped by but also define the world in which we live.
Booklist Reviews
After confessing his stamp-collecting obsession in The Error World (2008), Garfield shares his ardor for typefaces in this ambushing and revelatory celebration. He begins by praising the computer's role in making us all font-savvy as we select among familiar and exotic offerings, from Arial to Ravie. But this easy access belies the deep story of the creation of alphabets from Gutenberg on. Garfield opens our eyes to type's technical evolution, the subtleties of font design (beauty versus readability), how type has gender, and even "type etiquette." But this isn't all p's and q's. Garfield matches flesh to type in avid profiles of gifted typographers, including the scandalous Eric Gill, Claude Garamond, John Baskerville, Frederic Goudy, and Luc(as) de Groot, creator of Calibri, which "has changed the whole look of mass communication." Signage, political campaigns, newspapers, websites, the ubiquitous Helvetica—how profoundly type shapes our world! Garfield's romping history (with multitype text) is zestfully informative. And who can resist a book with the sentence, "Hermann Zapf will always be remembered for his dingbats"? Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.
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