This morning I reached the end of Just My Type, I sighed and put the book down, wishing it had been a lot longer and I hadn’t read it so quickly. Fonts, can I hear you asking, what’s interesting about them? But you’d be so wrong, all human life is here, Simon Garfield tracks the history of fonts from Gutenberg to almost yesterday. What we read and what we write or view on our computers - how we see politics, advertising, entertainment are all influenced by Bodoni, Optima, Times New Roman and a host of other fonts. The book itself is a splendid piece of publishing and beautifully illustrated in the text with font examples and with additional well chosen illustrations.
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| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Recommendations: |
This is a non-fiction Christmas bestseller. Just My Type is not just a font book, but a book of stories. It is: about how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world; about why Barack Obama opted for Gotham, while Amy Winehouse found her soul in 30s Art Deco; about the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, or people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook, or Margaret Calvert, who invented the motorway signs that are used from Watford Gap to Abu Dhabi; about the pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers...and typefaces became something we realised we all have an opinion about. As the Sunday Times review put it, the book is a kind of Eats, Shoots and Leaves for letters, revealing the extent to which fonts are not only shaped by but also define the world in which we live .
Just My Type : A Book About Fonts features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Non-Fiction Books of the Month, eBooks of the Month, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations
Just My Type : A Book About Fonts is available in Paperback
Just My Type : A Book About Fonts was written by Simon Garfield and published by Profile Books Ltd
Just My Type : A Book About Fonts has 352 pages
£11.69