Typophile

Comprehensive Historical Type Directory?

Fisheye0 votes

I've been looking for a good directory of typefaces, categorized by Type Historical (or at least Art Historical) period, e.g. (Baroque, Neoclassical, etc). There are so many directories, guides and books, but all of them seem to be categorized by style (Blackletter, Serif, etc), not period. I have seen small historical guides, such as the four-pager in Bringhurst's EOT, but none as comprehensive as I'd like. Has an authoritative historical directory managed to elude me?

Even better, perhaps there's a list of all the authoritative type manuals and guides? I checked the Typowiki, but the book listing definitely leaves much to be desired at this point.

Alessandro Segalini0 votes

http://abc.planet-typography.com

http://www.textism.com/textfaces

http://redsun.com/type/abriefhistoryoftype

Fisheye0 votes

Thanks, but I'm really looking for something with many more type families and thorough descriptions, histories.

The Twenty Faces on Textism sure is pretty though! ;-)

Mark Simonson0 votes

An Atlas of Typefaces by James Sutton and Alan Bartram is good if you can find it. It is a survey of current (as of the 1980s) typefaces presented historically, with historical examples.

Art of the Printed Book is pretty good, but is not about typefaces per se.

Alessandro Segalini0 votes

I like your question very much. Try : http://tinyurl.com/8mrq2

Regards,
AS

Nick Shinn0 votes

You could combine Lewis Blackwell's "20th Century Type Remix" with D.B. Updike's "Printing Types" (although he's a bit light on the 19th century).
But really, this sounds like a Wiki project: a database of typeface info which could be sorted by font name, designer, foundry, country, or year. Or even type category.

Fisheye0 votes

A database like that would be truly amazing. My design team is always brining me work with bizarre pairings, such as a 20th Century Modernist headline with Baroque text. Not that such anachronisms are necessarily wrong, but I encourage everyone to think of type in a historical context which, IMHO, creates a "setting" just as an novelist wouldn't put a wristwatch on a fictional Renaissance philosopher.

caren litherland0 votes

> A database like that would be truly amazing.

Wouldn't it, though?

The folks at TypeBase seem to be making a gesture in that direction, even if it's not quite there yet.

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