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Typographic Style

If you’re interested in typography, odds are you’ve already read The Elements of Typographic Style.

If you’re not interested in typography, design, fonts, or any related area, skip the book. However, you may still find the turn of phrase in the following quote to be interesting.

… setting type is a collaborative exercise, like acting from a script or playing from a score. The editing of type, like the editing of music, and the tuning of fonts, like the tuning of instruments, never ends.

There are those who dream of a perfect world in which copyrighted text is translated into copyrighted glyphs through copyrighted rules with no more human intervention than it takes to feed a tape to a machine, while money flows in perpetuity to everyone involved. There are also those that think that putting chairs and air-conditioners in hell will make it just as good as heaven. Actually, working with type is an earthly task, much less like sitting down and turning on TV than like walking on your hands across an ever-varied, never-ending landscape that is otherwise too far away to see.

Written by an author who is clearly passionate about his subject.