Customer Reviews

An Introduction to the History of Printing Types

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In this book's introduction, the author said "The text has not only been made deliberately brief but we have tried not to bestrew it with too many names and dates." I found it very true. Because less than one third of this book was text. The rest of them, examples of typefaces. It is good that this book contains many beautifully reproduced type speciments. But the text is really too thin to be very educative.

This book is composed of two parts: book types and display types. In the beginning, there's an introduction on the typography business, how illogical product names made this art confusing to most people. Then the author introduced many widely-used book and display typefaces in historical orders. But he did speak too little on each typefaces.

This book is almost as good as Jan Tschichold's _Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering_. Yet I am a little disappointed. Perhaps it was because this book's title suggested more than a collection of type speciments. I expect to learn more from this book.

This book includes over a hundred specimens of historical typesetting, covering every age from the 42-line Bible to the early 20th century. The author took the unusual step of reproducing each specimen at 100% of its original size, even it it meant cutting one of the original pages short. Scaled images of characters never tell the visual truth about the letterforms, so this is the only meaningful way to experience typesetting in these specimens.

Dowding organized the book's chapters into a taxonomy of type styles, giving a brief summary of the origin, historical development, and available fonts in that style, as of the orginal printing date. Most, though not all chapters give a brief checklist of that style's distinguishing features. This could have been expanded, I think, handled more uniformly from chapter to chapter, and could have included the distinguishing items that differentiate one family from another. For all its lacks, this is a good description of the various styles a typographic student will encounter.

What makes this book stand out is over 45 pages of commentary in the back of the book, describing the distinguishing features of each specimen. There's a bit of historical information in many of the commentaries, bordering on gossip at times. The real value, however, is in the discussion of each typeface as a unique composition, and sometimes in contrast to others. It's not explicit but there is a unique lesson here, a sustained discussion in how to look at letterforms. I fault it only for weakness in addressing sanserif fonts, which deserve a lot more than the two perfunctory pages shown here. Perhaps when this was written, the sans fonts hadn't gained enough popularity to warrant discussion. Perhaps, however, Dowding's biases and historical sources shied from such "grotesque" shapes.

This is an exceptional reference for any student wanting to start on serious discussions of letterforms. The only real problem with this book is that it's not very deep or systematic in teaching the history its title seemed to promise. Take it for what it is, however, and I think it's quite good.

//wiredweird