Customer Reviews

500 Years of Book Design

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

 

 

There are several superb books on the history of book design: Joseph Blumenthal, Art of the Printed Book 1455-1955; Norma Levarie, The Art and History of Books; S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing; and Warren Chappell and Robert Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed Word.

Alas Alan Bartram's Five Hundred Years of Book Design is uninformative, unscholarly, and unpleasant. The analytical level is casual, adolescent. Readers will learn little about books from the thin text.

The photographs of the great books, taken at the British Library, are murky and out of focus.

How did Yale University Press come to publish this turkey?

Alan Bartram takes those high and mighty old farts down a notch or two. What did Nicolas Jenson, Aldus Manutius, William Caslon, and John Baskerville really know about book design, anyway? (Besides more than you and I will ever know, even if we devote the rest of our lives to study.) Bartram has the audacity to take on some of the greatest printers in the history of movable type and point out the flaws in their designs. The result is witty, learned, and educational. By starting at the beginning and working forward, he is able to simply demonstrate the origins and necessity of some of the features of modern typography we take most for granted, like indented paragraphs and intermingled roman and italic types. It's also humbling to see how understated and elegant these supposedly primitive designs are compared to the vast majority of books being printed today.

When one of the world's most renowned designers calls a book about design a turkey, it's a bit of a shock, which makes it a little intimidating to contradict him. Still, I think this book's emphasis on interior matter (i.e. the text, where most of us spend the majority of our time with books) and its penetrating, critical tone, coupled with the profuse illustrations (which are both clear and legible in my copy) make it a useful complement to the works of Bringhurst / Chappell, Blumenthal, and others.

Finally! I have been looking for a book like this for a long time. It is a very straight-forward, down-to-earth and comprehensible critique of the elements of book design. It includes design of pages containing text only and of pages containing text and illustrations together. The descriptions are not overly wordy as is the case with many books on this topic. Bertram does not try to impress you with thick and stringy prose. Instead, each page of this book has an image of a page from an historical book, with a few sentences above the image. Those sentences do not waste your time. They are clear and tight. As you read the author's comments you can look down at the image and see exactly what point he is describing and judge for yourself whether the designers of the historical book made wise or unwise decisions. Bartram has done an excellent job, Mr. Tufte's histrionic review notwithstanding.