On the Elements of Typographic Style

Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is both a pleasure to hold and slow work to read—an aesthetic object and a demanding book at once.

The first thing I noticed on picking it up was the quality of the paper. The colophon states that the “paper is Glatfelter Laid, made at the Spring Grove Mill in Pennsylvania. It is of archival quality and acid-free.” I wish all books were printed on materials like it. You can see the texture on the page, and it is so soft in my hands.

The second thing any reader will notice is that the book is designed in ways that few others are. It should go without saying that a book on typographic design ought to be typographically well-designed, but Bringhurst’s goes well above and beyond. Take the dimensions of a single leaf, which by my own measurement come to 5.5" wide by 9" tall. As a ratio, that is about 1:1.6—a hair over Bringhurst’s golden 1:1.618. By his “chromatic scale of page proportions,” it lands squarely on the sixth, about midway between its major and minor. The outer margins sit at 1.25 inches, the top margin at 3/4 of an inch, and the bottom margin, under the page number, at 1.25 inches again.

All this is to say that the book was made with remarkable attention to detail, and that, more than anything, is what makes it a pleasure.

The sections fall into classic categories—among them “grand design,” “rhythm and proportion,” “harmony and counterpoint,” “shaping the page,” and “grooming the font.”

When I began, I expected the book to be about fonts above all. My thinking was that typography was effectively about what letters look like, and I was thrilled to learn about picas and ems, ratios and axes, serifs and apertures, and the hundreds of thousands of characters that never fit onto the Anglophone North American QWERTY keyboard.

Each time I read a chapter, I would find myself opening LibreOffice Writer—or, if I was on a work project at the office, Microsoft Word. I would poke at the kerning and the character spacing, nudging the small caps until they sat just right, so my own pages might look as carefully made as the words on them. I’m not sure I can stand another moment of monocultural Cambria, Calibri, or Times New Roman.

I’ve found that my preferred fonts for professional documents are Spectral for headings and Inria Sans for body text, with touches of Iosevka Etoile for tabular information (phone numbers, metadata, and so on). When writing long-form texts, I invert the general style and use a serif for the body and unserifed type for the headings, as you can see on this website. I’ve also learned that Spectral, for instance, needs to breathe more than some other typefaces, so I’ve played with whitespace to see how it all fits together. It’s only a shame that everything I’ve written to date has been printed on lower-quality paper with standard Epson or Canon toners.

One of Bringhurst’s greatest strengths is how opinionated he is. He has serious taste, and no patience for anyone who hasn’t taken the time to cultivate their own. I get the sense his own favorites run to Baskerville and Palatino. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, to his eye, mostly an error; he has little affection for Baroque or Rococo faces either, and none at all for Times New Roman, Helvetica, or anything you might find in a newspaper. To his credit, he admires Futura and a few geometric unserifed faces—something I paid close attention to, since the headings on this site are set in a descendant of Futura. He respects a handful of contemporary typographers too, above all Hermann Zapf and Robert Slimbach, whose Minion Pro sets the book itself.

He pays close attention to kerning and ligatures, and reveres the early printers on two counts: for treating italic as a partner to roman type rather than a mere slant of it, and for the continuity they kept between manuscript hands and the first typefaces. Revivals of old faces get special attention—some he eviscerates, others earn his deepest respect.

More than anything else, his appendices are a gold mine: a glossary of characters, a glossary of terms (worth a second bookmark, for when you forget what a humanist axis or a lachrymal terminal or a swash is—as I did, numerous times), and indices of designers and foundries. I found myself thumbing through them far more often than the final chapter, “Prowling the Specimen Books,” which elaborates on a few dozen of his preferred typefaces.

I read this book slowly, and I’m glad I did. It is the kind of book you read once through, then return to as a reference whenever you need it. There is so much here that there’s little chance of holding it all, but I do feel it helped me develop—even incrementally—my own sense of taste.

Typography, done well, is invisible, and yet it fundamentally shapes our relationship to whatever we read.