Just My Type by Simon Garfield (Profile Books)
Last year I read two of Garfield's shorter books about specific fonts and found them fascinating and so I knew that I had to put his longer book about them on my Christmas list - thankfully Father Christmas let my parents know and Just My Type was under the tree for me in December!
This has been a brilliant book to dip in and out of during tea breaks as it is split into lots of short chapters about fonts, design and printing in general with these interspersed with event shorter chapters on specific fonts.
As the daughter of a printer, someone who used to be really into calligraphy, and an avid consumer of the printed word I can't understand why it has taken me over 10 years to discover this book but better late than never! I can also imagine the 'fun' that the typesetter had incorporating all of the different fonts (sometimes in the same sentence) in to the text and still managing to keep the book legible.
As with any book that goes into such detail there are going to be some bits that weren't quite so interesting but these were few and far apart in this one and I am now looking forward to a visit to the St Bride's Print Foundation that a friend and I have booked for late spring.
As an aside the BBC aired a wonderful programme recently all about how the modern printing process works and it made a brilliant companion watch to this book, and this is currently still available to watch on the BBC iPlayer
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