Quotes from The Elements of Typographic style

During the Christmas holidays, I had time to read an interesting classic, The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. The book kind of was on my to read list since Hack Design typography lessons. The author's love of typography is strongly present in the book, as well as his background as a poet and an author. I collected some fascinating quotes from the book.

First, some thoughts on purpose of typography:

... typography should perform these services for the reader:

• invite the reader into the text
• reveal the tenor and meaning of the text
• clarify the structure and order of the text
• link the text with other existing elements
• induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.

On a well made book

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.

Quality or quantity?

With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.

Good typography is like bread

Logotypes and logograms push typography in the direction of hieroglyphics, which tend to be looked at rather than read. They also push it toward the realm of candy and drugs, which tend to provoke dependent responses, and away from the realm of food, which tends to promote autonomous being. Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised, and dissected before it is consumed.

Thread metaphor

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns — but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

Motivation for text figures

It is true that text figures are rarely useful in classified ads, but they are useful for setting almost everything else, including good magazine copy and newspaper copy. They are basic parts of typographic speech, and they are a sign of civilization: a sign that dollars are not really twice as important as ideas, and numbers are not afraid to consort on an equal footing with words.

Shaping the page

A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and the body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.

On craftsmanship and instinct

Instinct, in matters like these, is largely memory in disguise. It works quite well when it is trained, and porky otherwise. But in a craft like typography, no matter how perfect one's instincts are, it is useful to be able to calculate answers exactly. History, natural science, geometry and mathematics are all relevant to typography in this regard - and can all be counted on for aid.

By the way, this reminds me of the discussion on intuition in the book Thinking - fast and slow.

Bringhurst doesn't value reading literature from a screen

The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertising and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

Whether typography is more engineering or art

The rate of change in typesetting methods has been steep — perhaps it has approximated the Fibonacci series — for more than a century. Yet, like poetry and painting, storytelling and weaving, typography itself has not improved. There is no greater proof that typography is more art than engineering. Like all the arts, it is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change.