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This book does exactly what it says on the tin.
The book as a physical object entirely displays the manifest excellences of Bringhurst's grasp of good typographic style. The book is a beautiful object.
The contents of the book are also pretty good! Bringhurst is a surprisingly compelling author (or maybe I'm just surprised at the depth of my nerdiness, that I would read a typographic manual straight through......).
The book is charmingly over-convinced of the subject's utmost importance, though - I mean, yes, I agree, this stuff IS important, but perhaps not quite as deeply vital as the author thinks. But it's entirely reasonable that a book that's all about nothing but this would be convinced that this is important! And it DOES make a difference in terms of the pleasure of reading a book.
I will say I didn't read ALL all of it - there was one bit that was all about the precise mathematics of the decisions of page size and ratios, and the text block size and position in relation to the page shape/size, and the author kindly gave permission to just skim over that bit if the reader isn't into the math stuff. So I took the author up on that permission.
Also, in the bit where he's got a paragraph description of each of a whole bunch of different fonts, I didn't read all of those very closely, because they got a bit tedious.
But otherwise: great book! Even for someone like me who has no actual reason to have to know any of these things. And I bet for someone who actually DOES (like a graphic designer or whatever) this book would be of high value.
The book as a physical object entirely displays the manifest excellences of Bringhurst's grasp of good typographic style. The book is a beautiful object.
The contents of the book are also pretty good! Bringhurst is a surprisingly compelling author (or maybe I'm just surprised at the depth of my nerdiness, that I would read a typographic manual straight through......).
The book is charmingly over-convinced of the subject's utmost importance, though - I mean, yes, I agree, this stuff IS important, but perhaps not quite as deeply vital as the author thinks. But it's entirely reasonable that a book that's all about nothing but this would be convinced that this is important! And it DOES make a difference in terms of the pleasure of reading a book.
I will say I didn't read ALL all of it - there was one bit that was all about the precise mathematics of the decisions of page size and ratios, and the text block size and position in relation to the page shape/size, and the author kindly gave permission to just skim over that bit if the reader isn't into the math stuff. So I took the author up on that permission.
Also, in the bit where he's got a paragraph description of each of a whole bunch of different fonts, I didn't read all of those very closely, because they got a bit tedious.
But otherwise: great book! Even for someone like me who has no actual reason to have to know any of these things. And I bet for someone who actually DOES (like a graphic designer or whatever) this book would be of high value.
