This is a book about typography. For our purposes, typography is the subject of typefaces and the matters involved in their creation and application.

The arrangement of letters on a page is an arcane corner of interest. In general, it has not proven a route to great individual advancement in a single lifetime. We know this from the biographies of typographers throughout the ages, who at best have been temporarily feted, but have rarely benefited from the glamour or the income to match the creatives and industries that depend on their endeavours. John Baskerville’s corpse took some time before it found a respectable grave.

Why, then, are so many people interested in typography? The fascination with the subject itself would seem to be the answer. It is a subject that quickly gets devotees into uncharted depths, where aesthetics meet engineering, where art meets maths, where the strictly ephemeral and decorative meets a quest for timeless values and transparent functionalism. With this going on, typography becomes something you can believe in as a good cause. Typographers are not without all hope of worldly gain, but they suspend disbelief in the face of the evidence of predecessors who failed to achieve much more than the respect of some of their own kind. And this persists. So clearly it can be enough. Perhaps typography is a noble calling, or a self-deluding one.

The growing interest and dedication of many to this subject can be best explained by its rising stature as an area of study, rather than a trade discipline. It is a growth industry - at least in the sense that there is a growing amount of work; it is a debatable poont (which we will address later) to what greater value is being created by that explosion of typographic familiarity, certainly in financial terms. While once it was a craft-based, largely in the pragmatic, fast-moving hands of the compositor, over the past century it has moved out of the print shop and become a subject with close connections to the development of art, technology and literacy. That typography is not associated with some of the more avant-garde activities in communication and innovation, with the more expressive dimensions of graphic design, also makes it a subject likly to appeal to new designers seeking to make their mark. At least we can now see that typography is no backwater: it s a nexus of thought, and can claim to be the architecture of written language, which is no small thing given that our language is one of the key definers of our humanity. So typography may be arcane, but it is not immaterial. It can even be said to be at the centre of culture.

Excerpt from the introduction to Lewis Blackwell’s 20th-Century Type