What year is the Rookledge? While the old ones are fun to look at, the newest are the most useful.

(Of course, if the price is reasonable, it's probably worth getting anyway.) :-)

Not sure, I think it's a couple years old though. It's in a clearance-type sale.

Well, I got my copy of Rookledge. What a great resource! All sorts of stuff you just don't see every day. It was only $10 for the 2004 printing. Also picked up a copy of Teal Triggs' Type Design and a book called Signs. I think it was $40 for the works.

WELL: a new edition of Rookledge? I was unaware of this. My copy is 25 years old, 1st USA edition, 1st printing. I reviewed it for "Fine Print" in 1983. I do indeed use some of its principles of looking at types when I'm at work and when I'm in the classroom.

So, seeing Alex's original post here, I became very interested in getting a new edition, as a help to IDing faces, and to see how well it had integrated new faces into the old format. Then I went to Amazon and read a customer review [I should say I rarely read book reviews of any kind, and I do not necessarily trust "crowd wisdom" to help guide my reading habits]:

The reader/customer wrote: "While there is slightly more content, I think that the poor quality sample typography scans (assumedly from the original book) cause me to wonder if I should just keep using my original edition. It appears that even the linework and sample names have been rescanned."

SO . . . just how much new content is there in this 2004 Rookledge edition? Are this new edition's problems as bad as the reviewer suggested? Has anyone here got both books and made a comparison? I'm not sure I'll find this in bookstores around here, but I shall look.

I hope someone can help me. Thanks.

powers

The 2004 edition is just a reprint of the 1990 edition (which certainly is an update on the original, adding about 15 typefaces to the book and with a forward by Frutiger), and, as such, is missing many of the major recent faces; there's no Jenson or Myriad or Minion or Scala or ... the list goes on. It's not as useful as it could be for that reason. The edition I have doesn't look 'rescanned'. But I suppose, not having an original to compare from, I wouldn't know any better.