It's a lovely book, elegantly laid out, with a restrained use of colour and fonts. But Lordy, is it ever dull. I think you have to be really, really, really interested in fonts to enjoy this one. I was hoping for something that would help explain why the shapes of type would evoke certain associations, but for the most part there's text explaining something like "this font was based on the typeform by Frenchie LeParisien in 1740, and redrawn by Person McDesigner who worked at Linotype, but the OpenType font is better because it has the x-height of the original," etc., etc., so specific and dry, with occasional mini-biographies of the type designers. As fun as that sounds, after 10 or 12 iterations of the same kind of information, and the realisation that it's going to continue basically unchanged for another 88 or 90 fonts, well, it's dispiriting.

This is not a book who prose style compels you to return for more (unless you're really into that, in which case this is the book for you!) Every so often one of the essays would grab me a little more than usual, but then we'd be back to the extreme dryness that permeates the text (sorry to be oxymoronic--I'm sure wetness permeates more easily).

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve! ( )