The Elements of Typographic Style (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This lovely, well-written book is concerned foremost with creating beautiful typography and is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs. Author Robert Bringhurst writes about designing with the correct typeface; striving for rhythm, proportion, and harmony; choosing and combining type; designing pages; using section heads, subheads, footnotes, and tables; applying kerning and other type adjustments to improve legibility; and adding special characters, including punctuation and diacritical marks. The Elements of Typographic Style teaches the history of and the artistic and practical perspectives on a variety of type families that are available in Europe and America today.

The last section of the book classifies and displays many type families, offers a glossary of typography terms, and lists type designers and type foundries. The book briefly mentions digital typography, but otherwise ignores it, focusing instead on general typography and page- and type-design issues. Its examples include text in a variety of languages--including English, Russian, German, and Greek--which is particularly helpful if your work has a multinational focus. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In a discussion embracing five and a half centuries, poet and designer Bringhurst covers the design of individual characters of type and entire alphabets, as well as the layout of pages, including such items as footnotes, margins, and tables. A glossary defines terms such as kern, fore-edge, and pica, and there are annotated lists of type designers, from the 1400s until now, and of type foundries, mostly contemporary. An appendix illustrates unusual typographic characters, such as the Croatian "dyet" and the German "sharp s," and a final appendix lists, without annotation, more than 100 books and periodicals for further reading. The author's prose is sometimes flowery, and some of his strongly expressed opinions are questionable. Nonetheless, there's a wealth of sound advice and instruction here. Not required for most collections, this will be useful to graphic designers and those interested in the history of printed letterforms.?Margarete Gross, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Hartley & Marks Publishers; 2nd edition (2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0881791326
• ISBN-13: 978-0881791327
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #83,365 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I can't remain in my profession without this book., June 8, 2000

By	Brian M. Taylor "Book Producer" (Rising Sun, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a designer, I am always looking to hone my skills. I thought I was adept at setting type until I found this gem. Bringhurst's study of type covers the obvious to the arcane. Beautifully designed, it illustrates type and their families, page geometry, philosophies of design, and typesetting rules. Master Craftsman, Hermann Zapf (you know -- his faces are in your computer) said himself that "he wishes to see this book become the Typographers Bible". This book is a must for the writer, publisher, designer, and editor because it covers a multitude of topics and rules vital and common to each sector. This is the "Manual of Style" for typesetting. It requires us to think more carefully about the setting of words and its impact on writing: "Typography is to literature what musical performance is to composition -- full of endless opportunity for insight OR obtuseness." I recommend this for anyone even remotely interested in the artform of letters. I highly recommend it for writers considering designing their own books.

106 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, but can be improved, December 6, 2005

By	Erik Fleischer - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Elements of Typographic Style (Paperback)

The Elements of Typographic Style (version 3.1) is certainly a very well written book that contains not only a great deal of useful information but also interesting insights of a more subjective nature. However, it is not as perfect as practically every other review posted here suggests, and I would like to point out a few aspects in which it could be improved.

Little more than half of the 382-page book is filled with what I would call the actual "core" of the work. The other half is dedicated to analyses of the author's favourite typefaces (about 80 pages) and several appendices. There is nothing inherently bad about this distribution, but unfortunately some of the core parts were only given a cursory mention, when in my opinion they deserved more in-depth discussions.

So, for example:

(a) In chapter 8, Shaping the Page, the author lists countless page and textblock proportions and provides a large number of geometric figures representing page formats, but does little more than give each proportion a name ("Full Cross Octagon page", "Turned Hexagon" etc). He then gives a few examples, but not nearly enough, and leaves the reader wanting for more details on which proportions or formats would, in the author's analysis, be more appropriate for this or that type of text. And most of the numbers and diagrams merely take up space in the book, since just knowing about their existence does not help much.

(b) Two diagrams on page 6 (just before the table of contents) are supposed to show the reader how the author came up with the proportions for the book's pages and textblocks. Unfortunately, the hexagons, circles and intersecting lines are not accompanied by any kind of explanation (and reading chapter 8 is not enough to decipher them), so instead of serving as a useful practical example they do little more than decorate the front matter.

(c) In chapter 10, Grooming the Font, Bringhurst advises readers to mend defective glyphs and make glyphs that are missing from a font, but does not suggest ways in which these tasks might be accomplished. One can more or less guess how he went about making the corrections to Photina shown as an example, but it would be useful to be given a little more detailed information. Someone who needs to be told to fix a font certainly needs to be told how to fix it.

(d) On pages 204 and 205, the author shows "part of a text file designed to test for missing or dislocated glyphs". Why not give the reader the full file, as an appendix perhaps? Why not save the reader the trouble of trying to reproduce the full test text (after googling in vain for it), which probably will not be nearly as good as the one Bringhurst, a master typographer, has produced over the years?

(e) The author's suggestions for further reading are not annotated in any way, and many, if not most, of the books mentioned are out of print. The reader will seldom find information about the contents of the out-of-print books (which are often not made clear by the title) on Amazon.com, so comments by the author would have been extremely useful.

Another slightly disappointing feature of a book that has a section on page design is the fact that, at least in my humble opinion, the textblock is a little too close to the spine for comfortable reading -- but maybe there wasn't much the author could have done to anticipate the way the binding would work.

In the end, anyone serious about typography will want to get this book anyway: not only because it is probably the best in its class, but also because Bringhurst is a master from whom a lot can be learned. Having said that, until the issues mentioned above are addressed (perhaps in a future edition?), I would not consider this book worthy of "bible status".

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading, December 8, 1999

By	A. Cinque Hicks (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This book should be required reading for every graphic designer, book designer, typographer and certainly anyone directly or indirectly responsible for unleashing the current wave of awful typography on an unsuspecting public. Bringhurst covers everything from the basics of type styles to advanced kerning principles to the finer points of page proportions, all in a succint yet engaging way.

Bringhurst does an excellent job of laying out a series of rules and guidelines, while making it clear that these are a starting point, a foundation for good type design, not a set of limitations. He is a poet as well as a typographer, and his eloquence pays tribute to the field as no one else has.

The book features a good deal on the evolution of typography and includes great side-by-side comparisons of typefaces to illustrate specific points. He also deals extensively with punctuation marks, diacritics and the duty/joy of designing type with languages other than English in mind. I find myself returning again and again to the section on the subtleties of page proportions. He also achieves the nearly impossible balance of singing the praises of the old masters while not being afraid of the best of what's new and experimental.