(but not as much as i heart m…)

at jason santa maria’s suggestion, i decided to see if my local library has any of these books. indeed, it has a few. i started with The Elements of Typography (i am such a party animal) because of the similarity to the title of a strunk and white book and because i like the cover. at first, i thought mr. robert bringhurst was just a romantic typographer with his inflated, flowery language and use of many superlatives when discussing typography, but that was just chapter one. the subsequent chapters really are like strunk and white with all sorts of rules. i like this one the best:

Type design is an art practiced by few and mastered by fewer – but font-editing software makes it possible for anyone to alter in a moment the widths and shapes of letters to which an artist may have devoted decades of study, years of inspiration and a rare concentration of skill. The power to destroy such a type designer’s work should be used with caution…Typographic letters are made legible not only by their forms and by the color of the ink that prints them but also by the sculpted empty space between and around them…But in the world of digital type, it is very easy for a designer or compositor with no regard for letters to squish them into cattle trains and ship them to the slaughter…When letters are maltreated in this way, their reserve of legibility is sapped. They can do little in their turn except shortchange and brutalize the reader. Did he just anthropomorphize letters? Did he just liken them to cows? awesome.