rave: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

[jesse_the_k]

Robert Bringhurst's remarkable reference work, The Elements of Typographic Style, provides a full semester of type history in less than 400 pages. It's not just the book's elegant design nor well-chosen exemplars that so thrilled me I read both the 2nd and 3rd edition, dropping more than 50 stickies along the way. The current edition, version 4.3, is out of print and still focuses exclusively on printed material.

Bringhurst is a poet and translator. That last vocation has brought him into regular contact with non-Latin alphabets, and the Elements of Typographic Style provides the best advice I've ever seen in English regarding how to set type with accents, diacritics, and other "analphabetic characters."

I have loved letters all my life. From crayon scrawls to two handwriting styles (Johnson Foundational and Palmer Method) to the scores of italic hands I taught myself (and later deployed as a calligrapher-for-hire). I began pounding typewriters for fun before I could read. I went on to set type on EditWriters and LaserWriters and one early Linotronic 300

Foundational Hand (+FREE Worksheets)

EditWriters

ImageWriter

LaserWriter

Bringhurst’s Elements reviewed

---

I drafted this review a decade ago, and I still believe it, so it’s a proof of life post.

Comments

[sheafrotherdon]

I love this! I have a love of specific types of handwriting from my RL job too. 19th-century chicken scratch is a bugbear of mine, but occasionally I would read the work of a military secretary or some such, and be so happy! Gorgeous hands.

Oh the hand-written records of

[jesse_the_k]

bureaucracy before typewriters can be so beautiful! Sadly, chicken scratch seems to be the requirement for census takers.

If you enjoy medieval lettering, Christopher de Hamel's Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is breathtaking.

SPLORFLE!

[isis]

Your (very appropriate) icon made me laugh out loud!

Re: SPLORFLE!

[jesse_the_k]

The wonder that is jackshoegazer, maestro of the iconomicon, never stops delighting.

[fflo]

omg great post--- thanks!

[jesse_the_k]

Glad you enjoyed.