Austin-based designer Vitorio Miliano prefers to give books rather than lend them:
For me, the important parts of a book are inside me, after I’ve read it and taken it in. So, when I give you a book, I don’t want it back. It’s not a loan: it’s a gift; depending on the book, perhaps the gift of a passion, or of knowledge, or of understanding. The best thing that could happen is that you take that book, and you keep it – and me – in your heart.
So he gave 13 books to the Internet Archive, an organization that scans a thousand books a day and puts them online for the world to read.
One of the items in Miliano’s donation was the 1923 Manual of Linotype Typography, a unique type specimen that is as much about teaching typographic fundamentals as it is showing typefaces. As Joshua Lurie-Terrell wrote here years ago, the Manual is not your standard type catalog. While most specimens of this era mainly show their fonts through paragraphs of sample text and pages of stacked-and-justified showings, the focus of this book is type in use. Filled with mock examples of typesetting, from title pages and chapter openings to leaflets and advertisements, the Linotype Manual gives a good sense of how the printed world looked in the early 20th century.
“Critical Comment: The use of thick and thin rules with the Bodoni face dates back to the specimen sheets of Bodoni himself, and, in fact, to the origin of the modern letter. Its appropriateness is obvious, the thick and thin parts of the rules balancing the stems and hair lines of the type…”
You can see all 286 high-resolution pages of the book in the Internet Archive’s online viewer or download a complete PDF. Unfortunately, while the text is readable, the medium-resolution PDF is not a substitute for a printed copy. Whet your appetite with the online version, then cast your net on a bookseller cooperative like AbeBooks where prices range from $45 to $165.
Read more about Miliano’s donation at his site. It includes another piece of design history that is not as well known as the Linotype Manual, but perhaps just as interesting: The Art & Practice of Typography, Edmund G. Gress (1910). Not only does this book contain instructional illustrations and sample settings, but also some actual published work of the time.
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