Type Matters!

Simply elegant. Informative, too. Even if you aren't a book designer.

If you want to know about typesetting, this is the book for you. Very, very informative book. What makes this book one of the best 'what's it all about' ones I've ever read on any subject is the clarity, humor and - speaking sincerely - the elegance of the presentation. I had originally wanted to purchase (which has not arrived yet), but in reading the reviews of Just My Type, which is an account of fonts, I encountered numerous recommendations and citations of this one, which is written by a typesetting expert. The story of how the book came to be is pretty interesting. The book itself talks about different types of situations - say, where you want a tall, skinny swath of text and you wish to avoid what they call 'rivers' - those strips of white that develop as spaces between words as they pile up one atop the other. There's a way to tweak the font to change that. He has examples of what fonts work for what application. For example, if you have a patch of text in a fairly small size, you don't want to use something like Chilada (hint: it works well for Southwest Food-themed applications) and would do better to stick with Times New Roman or Tahoma. Well, it was fascinating for me. But then I do some of my own graphic design and formatting, and it's just interesting to read. For example, do you know where the terms 'upper case' and 'lower case' come from? Well, the capital letters ('upper case') type (the pieces set into the press) were generally kept on a top shelf and the 'lower case' ones were kept on a lower shelf. Mr. Williams writes well and with humor. The illustrations are very good, and even if you don't plan to set up a printing press or design books, you may very well enjoy this book and read it just for the fun of it. Read more