Typography At Its Best Is A Visual

In A World Rife With Unsolicited Messages, Typography Must Often Draw Attention To Itself Before It Will Be Read. Yet In Order To Be Read, It Must Relinquish The Attention It Has Drawn. Typography With Anything To Say Therefore Aspires To A Kind Of Statuesque Transparency. It's Other Traditional Goal Is Durability: Not Immunity To Change, But A Clear Superiority To Fashion. Typography At Its Best Is A Visual Form Of Language Linking Timelessness And Time.

Poetry, I'm Often Told, Is Something Made Of Words. I Think It Really Goes The Other Way Around: Words Are Made Of Poetry.

Typography Is To Literature As Musical Performance Is To Composition: An Essential Act Of Interpretation, Full Of Endless Opportunities For Insight Or Obtuseness.

Russian Literature, Like Colonial Canadian Literature, Comes With A Lot Of Landscape Backdrop.

In A Badly Designed Book, The Letters Mill And Stand Like Starving Horses In A Field. In A Book Designed By Rote, They Sit Like Stale Bread And Mutton On The Page. In A Well-made Book, Where Designer, Compositor And Printer Have All Done Their Jobs, No Matter How Many Thousands Of Lines And Pages, The Letters Are Alive. They Dance In Their Seats. Sometimes They Rise And Dance In The Margins And Aisles.