More than five hundred years on from its first practice, some mystery still surrounds the 'black art' of printing. And now, when the secure identity of the printing trade is threatened by instant printers, desk-top publishers and women compositors, the mystery has been displaced and further confused. Typographers feel this every time they are asked what exactly it is that they do. 'Oh, newspapers?' someone will hazard. 'No, books, leaflets, that sort of thing.' 'You print them?' 'No, design them,' 'You make the illustrations?' Then one tries to explain the function of editorial and visual decision-taking that should intervene - or may happen by default-between the writing of a text and its composition and multiplication as printed pages. The other familiar conversation is of insiders talking together: the obsessive discussions of the visual forms of text matter, of line-lengths and letterspacing. Between these two worlds, of the reader and of the designer of text, the gap may sometimes feel impossibly wide, and yet each depends on the other.

LRB 31 March 1988 | PDF Download