Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design

Tracy, Walter

ISBN 10: 0860920852 / ISBN 13: 9780860920854

Published by Gordon Fraser, 1986

About this Item

The dust jacket has a soiled spot on the front about 2.5" from the top and 1" from left edge, top front corner is torn, small tear towards lower corner, some light spine wear, price unclipped. Blue cloth boards are nice and clean as is the book's interior. All orders packed with care, dust jackets protected by Brodart sleeve, independent bookseller since 2011.

Seller Inventory # 08340

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design
• Publisher: Gordon Fraser
• Publication Date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0860920852
• ISBN 13: 9780860920854
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Books on Books

About this title

Synopsis

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 After more than fifty years of professional observation of type faces Walter Tracy thinks the good designs of recent creation are outnumbered 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 manufacture of them, is a preliminary to an analysis of the work of some of the great type designers of the frst half of this century: two American, one Dutch, one German, together with a detailed account of that phenomenon of twentieth-century typography, Times Roman. Anyone interested in the visual quality of print, whether as professional designers, typographers or as ordinary readers, will find this book a fascinating source of information and opinion, written with refreshing clarity and irony by a leading authority on the subject.