Author: Daniel Berkeley Updike

Publisher/Date: Oak Knoll Press 2001, orginally published at $49.95

ISBN: 9781584560609

Format/Condition: Two new softcover books: Vol 1 is near fine: lightly bumped corner; Vol 2 is fine. 1088 pages, illustrated.

Description: This extraordinary work explores the art of typography from the dawn of printing to the twentieth century. By tracing the development of type design, Updike discusses the importance of each historic period and the lessons they contain for today’s designers.

This two-volume set containis 367 typographical illustrations selected from rare and beautiful books. Updike’s well-written text constitutes a running commentary on the historical and artistic significance of these illustrations, which exemplify the best work of printers and type founders from Gutenberg to Bruce Rogers.

In Volume I, Mr. Updike discusses the Latin alphabet, the invention of printing, the cutting and casting of types, fifteenth-century types in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and England, as well as German, Italian and French types of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Volume II continues the discussion of types to the beginning of the nineteenth century and then describes American types and nineteenth-century types in general.

The closing chapters on choice of type and the industrial conditions of the past and their relationship to problems printers face are very informative.