Recommended Type Design and Typography Books

Stephen Coles

One thing I've learned from Bringhurst and his detractors is that it's important to read with skepticism. Nothing is all good or all bad. Much of Bringhurst is useful, but it has been inappropriately hailed for decades as the Bible of Typography. There is no bible of typography. The best way to learn is to read from a variety of sources and engage in the practice itself (work, experiment, learn from mistakes). 

Max Phillips

Much of Bringhurst is useful, but it has been inappropriately hailed for decades as the Bible of Typography.

Thank you, Stephen. I've never understood the Bringhurst hate (or the Bringhurst worship, for that matter).  The book does some things really well.  In other places, the author's preferences are passed off as law.  Not many writers on typography avoid that last trap, so why pillory Bringhurst for it?

Chris Lozos

Passed off as Law, is the problem.  This implies correctness in perpetuity.  With book typography, particularly in the pre-digital eras, you may have had more of a need for expediency of consistency.  But as the tools evolve the people that use them evolve and the people who read the outcome evolve. We cannot freeze what we do just to suit someones favorite point in time.  We have to design for the subject at hand, within the production schedule we are dealt, and with the people we are forced to deal with, to create a solution which works for that days needs.  Setting fixed laws binds hands.  We still need the opportunity to fail at trying a new way. Decades later, some historian will tell us what worked and what didn't work--at least until another historian years later, tells him/her they were wrong ;-)

Luke Freeman

For those who couldn't get Detail in typography it's in print with another publisher http://editions-b42.com/books/detail-typography/

Josh Apostolopoulos

I read Bringhurst's book in my first year as a design student, and it sparked an interest in what typography was and could be that no other introduction, concerned with the pragmatic aspects of type and its use, could have offered. I don't suspect Bringhurst wrote Elements knowing the audience it would eventually reach (and if I recall correctly, he says as much in the introduction), and the view that the only value of his writing lies in its applicability to multifarious contexts that typographers find themselves working within seems to me myopic.

John Hudson

I think it is important to bear in mind the context in which Bringhurst's book was initially written, which was that period in the early 1990s when traditional typesetting houses and the accumulated experience that they embodied disappeared pretty much overnight, and 'desktop publishers' floundered about with new tools and limited guidance. I've tried to describe this context to younger typographers, some of whom were infants at the time, and it's clear that they don't really believe how dire things were. They've grown up in a world in which information about any topic was readily available via the Internet, and in which there is a plethora of books, magazines, conferences, online forums, etc. devoted to typography.

Bringhurst's book also needs to be appreciated as part of a particular response to that context, which involved not only The Elements of Typographic Style but also other publications from Hartley & Marks, notably their edition of Tschichold's The Form of the Book. I'd argue that the programme of revivals that made up an important part of the Adobe Originals collection was part of the same impulse: to establish a baseline founded on a particular tradition of quality book typography.

Tschichold's own defence of his traditionalist move is worth bearing in mind too: it is easy to teach someone to do competent traditional typography; it is very much more difficult to develop the kind of skills that are needed to produce good 'asymmetric typography'. I think this translates very directly to the situation in the early 1990s, and to the response seen in books like The Elements of Typographic Style.

I've known a lot of people whose interest in typography was initially inspired by Bringhurst, and who have gone on to do all sorts of good work both within and outside the canons laid out in his book. As for the 'Bible of typography' epithet, that was Zapf's phrase, repeated as part of the jacket blurb of every edition of the book. It also should be taken as indicative of the context in which it was uttered.

Chris Lozos

it is easy to teach someone to do competent traditional typography; it is very much more difficult to develop the kind of skills that are needed to produce good 'asymmetric typography'.

I agree completely with John on this, well said. Traditional book typography of the pre-war era was taught quite well to typographers/typesetters who came out knowing their craft after a long apprenticeship with master craftsman.  As soon as the technology changed, these trained people were replaced by anyone who new how to type but not how to set.  It just became to easy to produce typesetting and ignore typography.

Kent Lew

Tschichold's own defence of his traditionalist move is worth bearing in mind too: it is easy to teach someone to do competent traditional typography; it is very much more difficult to develop the kind of skills that are needed to produce good 'asymmetric typography'.

John, are you sure you didn’t get that backwards? It would be a stronger defense of Tschichold’s later stance for him to claim that it is relatively easy to create competent asymmetric typography (the style of his youth), while the skills necessary for truly excellent traditional typography are much more subtle and deceptively difficult to master.

Or so it would seem to me, at least.

That aside, I agree with your assessment about the proper context for understanding (and interpreting) Bringhurst.

John Hudson

Kent, I'm pretty sure that I got Tschichold's statement right, but would need to go and track down the source. Tschichold's early modernist work involved a hands-on composition method in which the designer worked directly with the typographic materials; in his later period, he was mostly designing systems for other people to follow—famously for Penguin—and his observation was that traditional typography can be taught to any competent craftsperson, while asymmetric typography requires something more like an artist to be done well. The fact that traditional typography can be taught in terms of rule and canon—not to say it should be—is indicative of this. Modernist typography is, by it's nature, more exploratory. It developed certain tropes—use of sans serif, bold colour in geometric elements—, but remains strongly individualistic: Tschichold's own designs in that mode are unmistakably his, whereas his classical or traditional designs slip into a long anonymity.

Kent Lew

Okay, I can see that also. Typography at a meta-level.

Still, doesn’t seem like much of a defense against charges of selling out on his earlier stance. But perhaps I misconstrued the context of “defense.” I suppose here we’re talking about defense of pragmatism in the face of the challenges of production-izing at Penguin in order to achieve consistently high quality.

Dan Reynolds

I’d say you might be both right. Most of Tschichold’s writing was pedagogic. Elementar Typographie and especially Die Neue Typographie were written for typesetters at work in printing houses. While they are not as explicit as his rules for Penguin – that later case is different anyway, as it was a guide for a specific array of books for one publisher, first and foremost – they are clearly intended to teach typesetters what to do. Again, in the case of his 1920s publications, he definitely does encourage typesetters to look at modern art to learn about composition. The point of his early writing is not that asymmetric typography can only be performed by a few select typographers arranging the type by hand on the presses themselves. Indeed, the books are much more general than that and intend to help typesetters elevate the quality (according to his definition at the time, also delineated in his publications) of their work.

In at least that one regard, his early writings on asymmetric typography are not as different from his later works on classical book typography.

Nick Shinn

Already being an experienced typographer when Bringhurst’s Elements was published, and familiar with various style guides, what I found most stimulating about the book was his new historical typeface classification system, connecting with broad culture movements.  

Also, the very breadth of his reach—organized around a hierarchical “tree” system starting from 1.1.1—signalled the immense gravity of the work, and by extension the great importance of typography. I appreciated the symbolism of that, along with the title, —an homage to Strunk—which put fine typography on a par with the best writing.

Niche.

I don't know if anyone mentioned this but: Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works, great book. It does not go in depth of the technical elements of type design, but it's more about how we preserve type and how it can be used ! 

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

That's one of the very first type books I read.

elena Veguillas

Hi!
We, at Tipo e, have recently released How To Create Typefaces, originally written in Spanish by Cristóbal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer and José Scaglione, and now translated by Christopher Burke and Patricia Córdoba. 

It is focused on type design only, on the whole process of designing typefaces. 

Josh Apostolopoulos

@elena Veguillas Is Amazon UK the only option for buying the book? Is there a better option for those in Canada/North America?

elena Veguillas

@Josh Apostolopoulos Unfortunately not yet, we are working on finding solutions to sell it in bookshops, but being a small independent publishing house based in Europe it is hard work. As soon as we have some other options I will publish it here.  

Paul Miller

Mads Wildgaard said:

'Letters of credit' - Walter Tracy. As George Thomas suggests.
Anything Emigre and Fuse. Plus the aforementioned Frutiger book and his own - 'Signs and Symbols - their meaning and design'.

Just as a matter of interest, 'Letters of Credit' by Walter Tracy exists as a free dowloadable .PDF file on a website which might not be hard to find if one is familiar with the use of a search engine.

It is probably dodgy and illegal so I could not possibly reccommend anyone to download it.

However if one were so inclined it would be an alternative to buying a very expensive second hand copy of the physical book when they occasionally pop up on Amazon.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Libraries.

George Thomas

It is probably dodgy and illegal so I could not possibly reccommend anyone to download it.

It is best to not even mention such things here. Why publicize piracy?

Johannes Neumeier

This raises an interesting predicament. Some of these books mentioned here are famed and regarded essential reading from a craft knowledge point of view, but near unobtainable as original copies. While I detest reading from a screen, some of those books I would gladly buy as digital copies just to be able to read their contents. Alas, there often isn't any.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

There is some point beyond which it does become reasonable to ignore a copyright (and unreasonable for the copyright holder to demand compliance). But that point tends to be quite a bit more distant than most people will admit.

Beau Williamson

On Stone by Sumner Stone is a great monograph that steps through the creation of a font family. I found it very illuminating.

Lettering as Drawing: Contour and Silhouette by Nicolete Grey pairs very nicely with letterletter