“When we choose a typeface,” asks Garfield, “what are we really saying?” His book offers an informed and pleasing answer,...
A thoroughly entertaining, well-informed tour of typefaces, some now 560 years old, some invented within just the last few years.
If you own a computer, chances are good that you have hundreds of fonts available on your machine. Unless you’re a typophile, then the chances are equally good that you don’t make full use of all those possibilities—or know why Minion is different from Garamond is different from Times New Roman. Enter Garfield, a genial Briton who confesses to “a soft spot for Requiem Fine Roman and HT Gelateria.” Some fonts, by the author’s account, are dear and necessary—the late-Renaissance inventions of Claude Garamond, for instance, which, adapted by the English compositor William Caslon, “would provide the letters for the American Declaration of Independence,” or Sabon, “one of the most readable of all book fonts.” Others are an offense to the eye, such as Comic Sans, which started life innocently enough but has been used so overly and wrongly as to constitute a typographic felony. (Garfield defends the font’s designer, though, who also designed Trebuchet, “which is a nicely rounded semi-formal humanist font ideal for web design.” The author traces the evolution of font families over the several technologies of typemaking and typesetting that have emerged in the last half-millennium, including some of the digital ones that are used today. He is just old enough, too, to pay homage to typography in quite another context, namely the “boastful B” and “dropped T” spelling out “The Beatles” on Ringo Starr’s drum kit. He also offers pointers on what fonts work best for what uses, even if some of his profiles should remain lost forever: The world would be a better place without Souvenir Light and Cooper Black.
“When we choose a typeface,” asks Garfield, “what are we really saying?” His book offers an informed and pleasing answer, and a lively companion to books such as Robert Bringhurst’s essential Elements of Typographic Style (1992) and John Lewis’s classic Typography: Design and Practice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59240-652-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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