About this item
A hugely entertaining and revealing guide to the history of type that asks What does your favorite font say about you Fonts surround us every day on street signs and buildings on movie posters and books and on just about every product we buy But where do fonts come from and why do we need so many Who is responsible for the staid practicality of Times New Roman the cool anonymity of Arial or the irritating levity of Comic Sans and the movement to ban itTypefaces are now years old but we barely knew their names until about twenty years ago when the pull-down font menus on our first computers made us all the gods of type Beginning in the early days of Gutenberg and ending with the most adventurous digital fonts Simon Garfield explores the rich history and subtle powers of type He goes on to investigate a range of modern mysteries including how Helvetica took over the world what inspires the seeming ubiquitous use of Trajan on bad movie posters and exactly why the all-type cover of Men are from Mars Women are from Venus was so effective It also examines why the quotTquot in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters and how Gotham helped Barack Obama into the White House A must-have book for the design conscious Just My Types cheeky irreverence will also charm everyone who loved Eats Shoots amp Leaves and Schotts Original Miscellany.
About the Author
British writer Simon Garfield is the author or editor of 20 books of non-fiction, including the international bestsellers Just My Type, On The Map and Mauve. His latest book is Dog's Best Friend: The Story Of An Unbreakable Bond.His other titles cover an appealingly diverse and unpredictable array of subjects, ranging from the award-winning history of Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence, to the hilarious oral history of the British entertainment The Wrestling. His celebration of letter writing, To The Letter, was one of the inspirations for the theatre show Letters Live with Benedict Cumberbatch, and spawned the BBC play My Dear Bessie with Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey. His other labour of love is A Notable Woman, the edited lifetime journals of the remarkable Jean Lucey Pratt, whom readers first met (when she was named Maggie Joy Blunt) in Garfield's three popular collections of diaries from the Mass Observation Archive. Jean began her journal in 1925 when she was 15, and maintained it until a few weeks before her death in 1986. Throughout she wrote lyrically, comically and honestly about her world and her friends (and particularly well about the disappoints of men) . She trained as a journalist and an architect, and ran a bookshop In Burnham Beeches for 20 years. Jean wrote well over a million words, and A Notable Woman, which contains about a quarter of her output, fulfils her long-standing dream that her writing would one day make it into print. Much of Garfield's work reflects a desire to reinterpret human history in an unusual and addictively readable way, and to look askance at topics we may often take for granted. To this end, Timekeepers examines the history of our ever-accelerating world, and In Miniature looks at our desire to bring that world down to size so that we may better understand it. His latest book is Dog's Best Friend: A Brief History Of An Unbreakable Bond, an engaging and moving investigation into our relationship with dogs. It begins with a simple question as he considers his own labrador - 'Why is he here? ' - and examines the reasons for domestication, and how we have named, trained, depicted and written about dogs throughout our history. The books also looks at the ability of dogs to heal and comfort us, the merits of designer dogs and performing dogs, and explains how we may best train a dog to provide a lifetime of happiness and love. Ahead of publication, the book has been highly praised by John Bradshaw and Andy Miller, among others. Simon Garfield was born in London in 1960. He lives with his wife Justine and dog Ludo near Hampstead Heath in London, and sometimes in St Ives, Cornwall. He misses live theatre and soccer, but still enjoys cycling and most things by Tracy Kidder, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Nicholson Baker, Michael Chabon, Simon Armitage, The Kills, The National, Elvis Costello, Lloyle Carner and Jorja Smith.www.simongarfield.com
