In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.

The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

A celebration of the world of letters found or created in unexpected places: natural, artificial, and urban alike Even non-graphic designers know that type is everywhere: fonts and typefaces fill everything we consume or inhabit. They communicate, inform, sell, explain . . . and yet finding serendipitous letterforms in the least likely locations can also excite and inspire. Once experienced, it is impossible not to see letters in anything from forests to housing projects, from leaves to brickwork. The eye becomes accustomed to seeing a world built of letters. Unlike most books on typography that present the “best” and most refined examples, the object here is to reveal the "lost" or "unseen" typographies in nature and our cities. From machine-made and sculptural forms to flora and fauna, from the fading ghost types on buildings from a pre-digital age to the subterranean forms found beneath our urban centers, from crowd-sourced creations to the popular vernacular, there is a universe of letterforms all around us.

From typographic illustrator Marian Bantjes, I Wonder will make you think in new ways about art, design, beauty, and popular culture. This unique presentation features the elaborately crafted word pictures of Marian Bantjes, the most inventive and creative typographic illustrator of our time. Whether intricately hand-drawn or using computer illustration software, Bantjes's work crosses the boundaries of time, style, and technology. There is, however, another side to Bantjes's visual work: her thoughtful treatises on art, design, beauty, and popular culture that add a deeper dimension to the decorative nature of her best-known work. These reflections cover the cult of Santa, road-side advertising, photography and memory, the alphabet's letterforms, heraldry, and stars. Bantjes's writing style ranges from the playful to the confrontational, but it is always imbued with perspicacity, insight, and a sense of fun. Intended to inspire creatives of any persuasion, this is more than a collection of ideas: Bantjes has meticulously illustrated every page of the book in her inimitable style to create an accessible work of art that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Quirky, poignant, astute, funny--this beautiful book presents a compelling collection of observations on visual culture and design. In Stefan Sagmeister's telling words, Bantjes's work is his "favorite example of beauty facilitating the communication of meaning." This paperback edition is expanded with a new essay from the author.

A hugely entertaining and revealing guide to the history of type that asks, What does your favorite font say about you? Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product we buy. But where do fonts come from, and why do we need so many? Who is responsible for the staid practicality of Times New Roman, the cool anonymity of Arial, or the irritating levity of Comic Sans (and the movement to ban it)? Typefaces are now 560 years old, but we barely knew their names until about twenty years ago when the pull-down font menus on our first computers made us all the gods of type. Beginning in the early days of Gutenberg and ending with the most adventurous digital fonts, Simon Garfield explores the rich history and subtle powers of type. He goes on to investigate a range of modern mysteries, including how Helvetica took over the world, what inspires the seeming ubiquitous use of Trajan on bad movie posters, and exactly why the all-type cover of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus was so effective. It also examines why the "T" in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters and how Gotham helped Barack Obama into the White House. A must-have book for the design conscious, Just My Type's cheeky irreverence will also charm everyone who loved Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Schott's Original Miscellany.

The book presents 60 "species" from the imagination of author and illustrator, A.W. Bainbridge, taken from a fictional manuscript by the Reverend Jackson Whitehead, who served aboard the HMS Pica--sister ship to the Beagle--during Charles Darwin's famous voyage in the 1830s. The menagerie of beasts, fish, fowl, and invertebrates, all created from traditional typefaces, numerals, and punctuation marks, ranges from the Bracket Spider or "Hanging Parentheses," which traps its prey by encasing them in its finely bracketed web, to the Comma Cat, identifiable by its very short pause.

One night a puppy,who is always late coming home finds there is no dessert for him. On board pages.