This book has very little to do with the theme of this blog, except, perhaps, at a stretch, the quest to make stuff beautiful. Makes a great present though for a certain type of person, and you’ll know someone.
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is just enormous geeky fun. It’s all about the fonts that surround us every day, their history, their designers, some of the fashions and controversies. It is true that after reading it, you’ll never look at printed words the same way again. I started, for instance, noticing what an unhealthy, disjointed font-nightmare a hospital corridor is. The same goes for the average British high street. But when people curate and corrall and design fonts, and put them together on a page, yummy.
I took ages to finish it, and (if I had a shelf for this purpose) would probably file it as ‘good loo reading.’
All of us know someone who’ll like this — the same people who read Lynne Truss’s ‘Shoots, eats and leaves’ for example.
I gave it four stars instead of five because, I mean, it’s quite a lot about the fiddly bits on the end of letters.
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