Garfield makes an important point early that, by themselves, letters are meaningless even though their silhouettes and strokes may lend them unique qualities of expression. Mostly he uses anecdotes to tell how something we take for granted has shaped and shaded our perceptions ever since humans first started carving messages on hard surfaces. The basics of font design are covered here - like serif versus sans serif, for instance, or principles of kerning and line spacing - but Garfield doesn’t overwhelm readers with too many technicalities. In 22 chapters, the author examines the ever-changing, almost organic nature of the printed word. “We walk around, and the history of type beckons from every angle, here a whisper, there an alarm.…” “We live at a time where we have never had such an engaging choice of fonts from which to design an alluring storefront or sell a product,” explains Garfield, who’s looked at such topics as stamps and the color mauve in his other books.
With wit and insight, he enlivens a topic that few outside the graphic trades might ponder.
Flying in the face of the digital-age mantra that “print is dead,” Simon Garfield’s “Just My Type” takes an engaging look at the world of fonts, the building blocks of everything we read.
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