Editor: Walter Tracy
Publisher: Gordon Fraser, London
Publication: 1986, First Edition
Binding: Hardcover, section sewn
Pages: 220
Size: 175 x 255
Text: English
ISBN: 0860920852
(Preface) 'The revolution in the technology of typesetting that began in the 1950s has accelerated in the last fifteen years or so.
The same is true of the methods of producing type. But there has been no revolution, or even evolution, in type faces themselves, the letter forms used in printing and screen graphics - for obvious reasons. Letters are a continuum. Any letter so designed as to bear no resemblance at all to its fundamental form would be self-defeating and useless. What has occurred is a rapid proliferation of type faces, because they are now much easier and quicker to produce than they used to be.
After more than fifty years of professional observation of type faces Walter Tracy thinks the good designs of recent creation are out-numbered by the mediocre and the downright bad, and that this is largely due to a lack of published critical analysis of type designs.
He has set down a personal view of the matter, in the hope that it will be useful to readers anxious to side-step the promoters' hype and form detached aesthetic judgements of their own.
The first half of the book, which recounts the basic facts about the nature of printing types and the manufacture of them, is a preliminary to an analysis of the work of some of the great type designers of the first half of this century: two American, one Dutch, one German, together with a detailed account of that phenomenon of twentieth-century typography, Times Roman...'
Condition: Very Good. Shelf ware consistent with age. Light rubbing and tanning to cover/edges. Fading to spine/cover.
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