Review by Booklist Review
After confessing his stamp-collecting obsession in The Error World (2008), Garfield shares his ardor for typefaces in this ambushing and revelatory celebration. He begins by praising the computer's role in making us all font-savvy as we select among familiar and exotic offerings, from Arial to Ravie. But this easy access belies the deep story of the creation of alphabets from Gutenberg on. Garfield opens our eyes to type's technical evolution, the subtleties of font design (beauty versus readability), how type has gender, and eve. type etiquette. But this isn't all p's and q's. Garfield matches flesh to type in avid profiles of gifted typographers, including the scandalous Eric Gill, Claude Garamond, John Baskerville, Frederic Goudy, and Luc(as) de Groot, creator of Calibri, whic. has changed the whole look of mass communication. Signage, political campaigns, newspapers, websites, the ubiquitous Helvetica how profoundly type shapes our world! Garfield's romping history (with multitype text) is zestfully informative. And who can resist a book with the sentence. Hermann Zapf will always be remembered for his dingbats ?--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Printed type is no mere neutral conveyor of ideas but an artistic medium in its own right, with psychological, social, and even sexual overtones, according to this lively romp through the history of fonts. Garfield (The End of Innocence) surveys fonts from Gutenberg's dour Gothic and the elegant classicism of Garamond to the childlike faux-naivete of Comic Sans, now so widely used for everything from medical brochures to tombstones that a movement has arisen to ban it. Along the way he revisits the sometimes lurid lives of the great typographers-incest and bestiality included-and explores the legibility of highway signs and the subliminal messaging of presidential campaign fonts. There's much pop psychology here-heavy, angular fonts seem male, apparently, while thin, curlicued ones are female-and a lot of engaging connoisseurship that occasionally goes overboard, especially when comparing look-alike modern sans serif fonts: you have to strain at gnats to distinguish the ubiquitous corporate cordiality of Helvetica from the "slightly softer and more rounded tone" of Arial. Regardless, Garfield's evocative prose-Cooper Black is "the sort of font the oils in a lava lamp would form if smashed to the floor"-entices us to see letters instead of just reading them. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The digital age took what was essentially an antiquarian hobby-the study and identification of typefaces and fonts-and turned it into a flourishing present-day avocation. What font do you select when typing at your keyboard? And which do you prefer for your e-reading? Baskerville? Verdana? How much do you know of the magical history behind your choices? Here is a wonderful update for those whose fondness for matters typographical predates the digital age, as well as those whose eyes need awakening to this particular enchantment. Although billed by its publisher as "fully revised for its U.S. release," it comes to us largely intact from the UK with a few domestic references added. Garfield (Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World) has a light touch and moves effortlessly among various aspects of typography past and present, not only from design perspectives but from accessible social, historical, and legal angles as well. There's a fascinating discussion of the ampersand, references to rock album covers with title fonts that stir the emotions, and a sobering clarification about copyright. Throughout, Garfield offers "fontbreaks" in which he focuses on the provenance of a particular typeface. An added pleasure: the book's own text switches fonts to briefly reflect the typeface under discussion. VERDICT Highly recommended to all, whether or not you feel predisposed to like this kind of thing! Eye-opening and mind-expanding!-Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A thoroughly entertaining, well-informed tour of typefaces, some now 560 years old, some invented within just the last few years.If you own a computer, chances are good that you have hundreds of fonts available on your machine. Unless you're a typophile, then the chances are equally good that you don't make full use of all those possibilitiesor know why Minion is different from Garamond is different from Times New Roman. Enter Garfield, a genial Briton who confesses to "a soft spot for Requiem Fine Roman and HT Gelateria." Some fonts, by the author's account, are dear and necessarythe late-Renaissance inventions of Claude Garamond, for instance, which, adapted by the English compositor William Caslon, "would provide the letters for the American Declaration of Independence," or Sabon, "one of the most readable of all book fonts." Others are an offense to the eye, such as Comic Sans, which started life innocently enough but has been used so overly and wrongly as to constitute a typographic felony. (Garfield defends the font's designer, though, who also designed Trebuchet, "which is a nicely rounded semi-formal humanist font ideal for web design." The author traces the evolution of font families over the several technologies of typemaking and typesetting that have emerged in the last half-millennium, including some of the digital ones that are used today. He is just old enough, too, to pay homage to typography in quite another context, namely the "boastful B" and "dropped T" spelling out "The Beatles" on Ringo Starr's drum kit. He also offers pointers on what fonts work best for what uses, even if some of his profiles should remain lost forever: The world would be a better place without Souvenir Light and Cooper Black."When we choose a typeface," asks Garfield, "what are we really saying?" His book offers an informed and pleasing answer, and a lively companion to books such as Robert Bringhurst's essentialElements of Typographic Style(1992) and John Lewis'sclassic Typography: Design and Practice.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
