This is a gorgeous book with many full color photos and prints on thick glossy paper with a sturdy binding. It's about the changes that have taken place in font design over the years and especially about the explosion in number of fonts available since the personal computer became widely available in the 1980s. It is primarily the story of digital type from the point of view of those who created the FontFont library of type, the FSI FontShop International in Berlin. It is about how desktop publishing changed the world of design and page layout.

Part of the text covers the history of fonts from a European point of view, but with the text and examples mostly in English. Another part of the text, which is woven through a myriad of font examples taken mostly from advertisements and magazine layouts describes the esoterica of fonts and their designers. There are first person accounts by font designers about their work. There are essays and articles and even an interview by designers from the US to England, Germany, even Iran and Pakistan. The artwork itself is stunningly beautiful, in places almost breathtaking. The book is quite simply a work of art itself.

I had some personal experience with fonts and the purely design side of letters and words some years ago when I sponsored a high school literary magazine. I learned how horrible a clashing mixture of fonts can be. My students did not have the trained eye or the experience to appreciate the subtleties of font distinctions and font design. I also taught some concrete poetry, which is the pictorial and artistic representation of letters and words (this book can be seen as an example of concrete poetry), and of course I downloaded PostScript fonts and worked with PageMaker and similar software.

This then is a book for artists and graphic designers. Many typefaces are described as well as pictured, and their characteristics and appropriate uses are presented. Some parts of the book are quite technical, and to be honest, well beyond my modest typographic expertise. The amount of information in the book's 352 pages is impressive, but more than anything this book is a treat for the eyes.

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