Alston Purvis

This chunky volume makes a nice coffee-table book for type nuts, but there are a few flies in the ointment that make you wonder about the quality of the copy-edit. For example, the page profiling the Lucida font repeatedly refers to its co-designer Kris Holmes as "he" (which she isn't) and spells Ed Benguiat's name incorrectly. The idea of setting each font's profile in that font itself works nicely for some of the text faces, but not at all for some display types: the blurb for Atomatic, for example, explicitly says "Linotype Atomatic is intended exclusively for headlines in large point sizes." Why did you set a whole page of body text in it then? Also, some of the font profiles do sound like they've been pasted straight from the foundry's marketing page; a feeling enhanced by the fact that the appendix "Useful Websites" lists the URLs only of font vendors, but not more generically-useful sites such as typophile.com. These quibbles aside, it's nicely put together, as you'd expect from Thames & Hudson, and the essays at the front are interesting enough.… (altro)