After being sick for almost a week now, I’ve decided to start doing homework so that I’ll be caught up when I finally do get better. For my History of the Book class, we’ve started reading Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which is an amazing book. No typographer should be without it.

And on page 42, I came across this: “No typesetting software should be permitted to compress, expand or letterspace the text automatically and arbitrarily as a means of fitting the copy. Copyfitting problems should be solved by creative design, not fobbed off on the reader and the text nor cast like pearls before machines.” Them’s strong words, there. And I agree. Yesterday when I wrote that auto-PDF post, I originally was dead-set against it and was going to write about why human-crafted is better. But something got the better of me. That something is now gone (whatever it was), and I won’t be casting my lot with any automatically generated PDF crowd any time soon. Book design is an art.

The calligraphy bug bit me today. It happened when I saw the back of a greeting card — the name of the press was styled in some kind of chancery cursive, and it looked really good. Hand-lettering would give a nice feel to my Riverglen books (the title pages, that is). So I’m going to learn calligraphy. There’s a calligraphy class here on campus and hopefully I’ll be able to get into it this next spring term, but even if I don’t, I still plan to teach myself.

Beyond that, eventually I’d like to start designing my own typefaces which I could use for printing books. But that’s a ways down the road. FontForge could do it, I suppose, but it’d be nice to have a native Mac font-making app that isn’t $700 (ahem, can we say Fontlab?). I’m really tempted to write my own. But that’s a project that will have to wait, because I’ve got too many other things on my plate right now. Someday, though… ~wistful sigh~

One last thing: for some typographical coolness, check out Caligraft.com. Wow.