During the typographically heroic inter-war years, Stanley Morison was advisor to the Monotype Corporation. In its discrimination and judgement, Morison's program for the cutting of book typefaces at Monotype set the stage for all subsequent work, and in one way or another must be reckoned with in any future development. The value of his work has not diminished with the passing of time or even with the commercial displacement of relief printing, the technology productive of four centuries of typographical letterforms. When aged sixty-four, Morison took a look back at his work in the pages of A Tally of Types, first privately printed at Cambridge in 1953 and produced in a second edition in 1973. Since the Tally was published, the revival of historic typefaces has been degraded and parially lost by the change from relief to photo-offset printing. But even before that came to pass, the revival of old typefaces was philosophically challenged by some of Morison's contemporaries and even, to some degree, devalued by Morison himself. The positive value of his work then, its timelessness and vitality, needs to be re-estbalished today. Mark Argetsinger's A Legacy of Letters—through a deep reading of the writings of Morison and his contemporaries—explores the question of type design and its relationship to the technologies of type production.

About the author. Mark Argetsinger, has been a staff designer at Knopf, Princeton University Press, and Meriden-Stinehour. He is presently a freelance designer working in Rochester, New York, where he has designed many books for the John Carter Brown Library, the Oak Spring Library, Cornell University, the Grolier Club, The Roxburghe Club, and The Frick Collection. His previous books include Harmony Discovered: P.J. Conkwright in the Tradition of Classical Typography and Thinking in Script.

About the book. 64 pages. 9 x 13 inches.Set in 13/16 Monotype Van Dijck with full-page typeface synopses of Centaur, Bembo, Poliphilus, Garamond, Van Dijck, Perpetua, Fournier, Baskerville, Bell, and Walbaum. Composition and letterpress printing by Michael and Winifred Bixler on Zerkall papers. Of eighty copies handbound at the Campbell-Logan Bindery in quarter leather with Japanese linen over boards, only sixty copies are available for $300 postpaid.

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Copyright © 2003 Michael & Winifred Bixler
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