Design Connoisseur: An Eclectic Collection of Imagery and Type, and: Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography (review)

When students first begin to work with typography, they feel as if they have to use dozens of blatantly differing fonts. It is only later, often much later, that they see the more subtle distinctions between one letterform and another. Having attained that awareness, there is no turning back, with the result that smart-set type appears-to a type taster-as full or smooth or dry as does a bouquet of wine to a wine taster. Thereafter, one has little choice but to fall in love with styles of type, to dote on one's bevy of favorite fonts, and to resort to owning books like these. Design Connoisseur offers page after page of obscure typographic remnants (long forgotten typefaces, ornaments, letterheads and logos), culled from antique specimen sheets, type books and trade magazines from 1896 through 1936. While it contains almost no text, it is a dazzling "museum without walls" of otherwise unattainable shards from the archaeology of typography. Texts on Type is the opposite, in the sense that it provides only a handful of visual examples, consisting instead of 50 essays by historic and contemporary designers, critics and teachers (among them Frederic Goudy, Ruari McLean, Emil Ruder, Jessica Helfand, Herbert Bayer and Beatrice Warde), who address type-related topics that (regrettably) may only be of interest to other designers, design historians and typophiles. As noted in a passage from W.A. Dwiggins in the latter book's foreword, letterforms "are so completely blended with the stream of written thought" that "only by an effort of attention does the layman discover that they exist at all."

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Fall 2001.)