Essay on Typography - Tapa blanda

Reseña del editor

Born in 1882, Gill was an artist, letter carver, gadfly, polemicist, and social reformer. In 1925, he had started drawing alphabets and printing books, and in 1931, this plainspoken little book was a fustian and forceful argu- ment for common sense in design, composed for anyone remotely interested in the subtle and evolving challenge of the typographic arts. Set rag right, with tight word spacing, it is a model of composition. The text, like most of Gill's, is exasperating, exorbitant, and exciting. But Gill was, above all, a craftsman, whose work always reflected his philoso- phy and whose hand always followed his moral convictions.

Nota de la solapa

An Essay on Typography was first published in 1931, instantly recognized as a classic, and has long been unavailable. It represents Gill at his best: opinionated, fustian, and consistently humane. It is his only major work on typography and remains indispensable for anyone interested in the art of letter forms and the presentation of graphic information.

This manifesto, however, is not only about letters "¬‚¬" their form, fit, and function "¬‚¬" but also about man's role in an industrial society. As Gill wrote later, it was his chief object "to describe two worlds "¬‚¬" that of industrialism and that of the human workman "¬‚¬" and to define their limits."

His thinking about type is still provocative. Here are the seeds of modern advertising: unjustified lines, tight word and letter spacing, ample leading. Here is vintage Gill, as polemical as he is practical, as much concerned about the soul of man as the work of man; as much obsessed by the ends as by the means.