The story of a foundational aspect of publishing, from Gutenberg’s press to today’s digital type.
It’s common knowledge that the name Gutenberg and the words “moveable type” go together. What’s far less known is that Garamond, Baskerville, and Bodoni aren’t just font options in a word processing dropdown menu, but the names of some of the real punchcutters and type designers who raised the essential work of typography to the level of art.
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One Hundred Books Famous in Typography, the latest entry in the Grolier Club’s prestigious Grolier Hundred series, is the story of art and technology working in harmony with each other, all the way from Johannes Gutenberg’s ingenious development of a system for reproducing texts through the introduction of newer technologies like hot-metal line casting, phototype, and digital type. Featuring scholarly yet accessible context for the works discussed and their typographical significance, and illustrated with more than two hundred images, Jerry Kelly’s book is the most comprehensive exploration yet of this essential facet of bookmaking and publishing.
