Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of Fonts

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The printing was quite UNNECESSARILY small, and it is very difficult seeing the details clearly with the naked eye on many of the more elaborate fonts. Mr. Headley may have done a nice job putting this book together (the two stars are for him and him alone), but the publisher has cheated both the editor and the reader by apparently trying to save an extra buck where printing costs were concerned. I was extremely disappointed with this volume.

It shows A-Z both in upper and lower case and numbers for every font. Nice and clear design of the display for different fonts. Index of fonts in the back is easy to find a font if you know the name. Besides, there is another index of fontographers. It doesn't show font family though. It shows only the basic type in a font family, but it's OK to me. It's hard to look up a font if you don't know the name. It seperates fonts into 6 catagory - uncial & black letter, Serifs, Lineales, Miscellaneous, Scripts and Display. Under the catagory, also has subcatagory. I like it and I think it is a very good deal of the price, too.

It is a large book with lots of fonts but the fonts are so small you can hardly see them. This is more of a reference font book than anything.

The Encyclopedia of Fonts it's something like a catalog. I think It will be more informative and deep about fonts

Very nice book that's just WAY TOO SMALL!!!, it's MORONIC to publish an encyclopedia of "anything" that measures 7x7 inches, serifs and other details are negligible.....it cannot be considered a definitive font reference book at this size, THE PRINT IS TOO SMALL!!!!, which is frustrating because that's exactly why I did (or you would) purchase this book. If they make the letters bigger it's a classic, at this size it's almost garbage.

I guess I didn't read the other reviews as carefully as I should have. I was looking for a book which would list the various fonts and give a complete (A-Z) example.

This book does that, but the author is primarily concerned with the history of fonts, which I don't really have any interest in nor is it relative to my needs. I wanted an alphabetical listing of fonts so I could flip through the book and find a font that fit my project. I haven't really figured out her organization, it's supposed to be by style and historical order, I think, I don't have the time or interest to figure it out. It's annoying. Finding examples of the fonts I have is tedious. I have to look them up in the index then find them in the book. Doesn't allow for the quick flip through I wanted to aid in font selection.

I decided to look up my fonts and hi-lite them, but this is a slow process and the ink hi-liting doesn't dry as quickly as I'd like causing the opposite page to pick up some of the color which may be confusing later. I've also found many of my most interesting fonts are not in this book. Plus sometimes her examples look nothing like my font with the same name, like architec. Her example is much heavier and nothing like the font I've seen in so many places. There are no dingbat fonts either, which I was really hoping for.

Considering it's girth it is amazing that so many semi-common fonts are left out; fonts often used in commercial layout.

This book was very disappointing. I needed different fonts to use in art projects and it is very difficult to see the fonts in this book. The whole book is in miniature, not the size of a normal reference book.

This book is full of fonts. It truly has every font I have ever seen in it. However the font sizes are so incredibly small that they are hard to actually look at. I wish it were printed a little bigger, but it is overall helpful.

This is one of my all-time favorite type specimen books. It's beautifully designed and printed. Easy to handle and has about 12,000 of the best of the digital typefaces. Includes designer's name, date, foundry, etc. One of the features is that complete alphabets are shown plus a specimen line. All are the same size for easy comparison. It'd be nice if the Italic "companion" fonts were shown but as one soon realizes, that wouldn't be possible. This book is 1-1/2" thick (nice paper!). Indexes include a listing of the designers so that one can find all the type faces a person designed. Highly recommended. Use it as Gwyn Headley intended it to be used and you'll find why I think so highly of it. I've worked with type for nearly 65 years and as you can imagine I've used a lot of type books over the years. This is ranked very close to the top.

This book is an excellent reference for every font you could imagine. It has everything from serif and sans serif to blackletter, display and graphic fonts. Fonts are categorized according to style and along side the sample of the typeface is the designer, foundry, weights and other info. The categorization of the fonts is a lesson in itself with categories I didn't know existed. It also has some information on font in the front. A great reference for anyone.