I like the Very Short Introductions, which often give me an overview of a subject in just a few pages, so I was very enthusiastic to read Typography: A very short introduction (2018). We are given the history of type and text in around 135 pages. But we are given quite a bit more, and that makes me think this book is not really about typography, but about information design.
Perhaps the problem is that the author, Paul Luna, is a very respected typographic designer and lecturer. Before moving to the University of Reading Department of Typography, he worked at Oxford University Press for over 20 years, and was responsible for the layout of many of their reference works and dictionaries. There is no question of his capabilities in the field of typography, but this book strays into information design, at which point it becomes sketchy and inadequate for the purpose. Any reasonable book on information design needs to be highly illustrated, in colour, and this book is neither.
Typography starts well. The history of the book is a subject that seems to have been left to specialists, while the amazing transformations in reading over the last 25 years have raised so many questions about what reading is and how it works. To answer those questions, we need to know more about how books developed. Just as you search for analogies between the early years of railways with the start of the Internet, you want to know just how the arrangement of books that we are so familiar with, such as contents pages, indexes, running heads, and so on, came about. Did they exist before printed books? Was the real transformation the invention of paper, rather than the invention of the book?
Typography raises all these questions, and for much of the history of the book answers them, but as we get closer to the digital age, typography is no longer the term to describe information layout. Luna describes the book as taking “a broad definition of typography – as design for reading, whether in print, on screen, or in the environment – and [this book] draws out ideas about the development of letterforms, the organizational and perceptual issues behind key typographic decisions, and the differences between printed and on-screen typography”. To be specific, the book tackles more than that, since it considers manuscripts and their organization.
But the presentation of information covers a lot more than “typography”, and it is a bit of misnomer to have this title. I don’t think I would describe as “typography” the layout of manuscripts, and I wouldn’t say it covers the kind of information design that is today possible once we have got beyond lines and spaces between them. Using graphics tools such as Illustrator or Photoshop, we can lay out a table or a graphic in any way we like – but I wouldn’t call that typography.
Without doubt, there is a pressing need for a history of the book, and Luna is well-informed about key events and dates. His book is much more readable than Febvre and Martin’s The Coming of the Book (1956), although inevitably more superficial. But the balance between information design and typography is, for this reader, a rather uncomfortable one. It’s not just graphic design that is lacking in detail; the need to accommodate a lot about typographic layout means that key aspects of book development, such as the contents page or the index, are not described. He does mention that Stephen Langton was responsible for the division of the Bible into chapters, and Robert Estienne printed individual sentences of the Bible as numbered verses. The development of the Christian Bible, and a comparison of the layout of, say, the Koran, would be fascinating, but there is no space to cover this aspect. Even with topics specifically relating to information design are not covered very equally. Five pages are dedicated to isotype design, which occupies just a tiny part of a standard book on data visualization (Better Data Visualizations, by Jonathan Schwabish), while many other types of visualization are not mentioned. Unfortunately, the one illustration chosen to display isotype charts was, for me, incomprehensible – it didn’t follow my expectation of a left-to-right reading order, for a start, and the symbols did not make sense to me.
Similarly, the coverage of e-books is just over one page, much of it negative. “Too often, linear reading and searching are the only reading strategies that are thoroughly supported”. Hyperlinks to references and citations, the ability to see definitions of any words in the text, and finding more examples of terms in the text than a human-generated index are not trivial capabilities.
To indicate how much of an overlap this book has with other potential works in this area, imagine how many people are studying “book design” or “information design”, or, simply, UX, and cover much of the material in this book. There is a common area of information design, of which typography is only a small part. It is revealing that while many institutions provide courses in graphic design, the University of Reading is the only one with “typography” in the department title. So the book is fascinating but leaves me wanting much more. Perhaps the perfect book on information design has yet to be written. It would contain all the limitations, and advantages, of each medium (papyrus, paper, book, journal, screen) and describe the kinds of information conveyed and how signalled (Luna is good a noticing that dictionaries and reference books tend to have multiple columns, for example). It would contain a detailed study of digital books and a discussion of what works, and what doesn’t work, when you transfer a print work to the screen, or better still, designing for digital use from day one. It would cover much of the content of Typography, but would lose the title “typography”. And it would be many times bigger.
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