A View of Early Typography. Up to about 1600

Beskrivning

Oxford University Press, Oxford 1969. First edition. Front plate, xii, 138 pages. Plates with 84 illustrations on glossy paper. Green cloth binding, dust jacket with protective mylar cover. In the series of The Lyell Lectures. Ex library copy with 5 stamps.

A now classic work, which summarizes what can be known about the production and use of type in the first 150 years of printing. Originally a set of lectures, the book is an informal discourse by a master of his topic. The argument is illustrated with a large gathering of pictures. It is a wonderful summary of what can be known about the production and use of type in the first 150 years of printing. By focusing on type, Carter goes to the heart of the matter: this is the point at which the material processes of printing meet the intellectual concerns of the publishers and the nature of the texts that they published. Among the topics covered: the technicalities of type production, and the passage from craft to industrial manufacture the diversity of letterforms (blackletter, roman, italic, and more) the tensions between Latin and the vernacular languages the establishment of standards and norms in type design. Carter ranges widely and deftly over the field of European printing in the period 1450—1600, drawing principally on his own long experience of the materials surviving from that time in libraries and archives. The argument is illustrated with a large gathering of pictures, mainly of details from books, freshly taken for this purpose.