The justification in Gutenberg's 42-Line bible worked quite well.

André

Herman Zapf’s books as rather well justified. As are most of the novels and nonfiction books published since the days of Gutenberg.

For examples of terrible justification, you can look at almost any e-book reader out there.

You would be well-served to research not only examples of good justification, but also technique, everything from abbreviation to glyph scaling, from Johannes Gutenberg to Hàn Thế Thành.

There are some useful links in this thread: http://typophile.com/node/64375

Your research would also not be complete without noting Eric Gill's dissension as to the wisdom of justified text, which can be found in §6 of An Essay on Typography.

If you want to see what a modern justification engine is capable of, you can read the documentation for the microtype package in LaTeX: microtype.pdf. Even if you read the section headings and nothing else, it will give you the vocabulary to describe what such software is capable of.

The following figure illustrates what can be accomplished with tracking alone (for good or ill).

In the case of monk-generated manuscripts, I have seen some that approach justification through just ending one line in the middle of a word, and then continuing to the next. And then there are the books set entirely without word spacing. I tend to think these were do to semi-literate monks who merely copied letter after letter, without understanding the concept of words.

Barbara,

the New Left Review, published in your city, has an outstanding layout, including excellent justification. It's a model for text-only DTP.

Hi,

Thanks for all your comments - they're really useful and you've given me some great ideas!

Barbara