Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. A Study in Survivals [2 vols, complete set]

Updike, Daniel Berkeley

Published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962

About this Item

2 vols. 8vo (24 cm), XLVI, 292 pp., 192 plates; XIX, 326 pp., plates 193-367. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket (jackets slightly sunned and rubbed at extremities, jacket of vol. 2 somewhat creased at head). Third edition (first published 1922 at the Merrymount Press) of Updike's monumental and enduring survey of Western printing types from the invention of printing to the early twentieth century. With a preface by Lawrence C. Wroth of the John Carter Brown Library. Volume I covers the invention of printing, the development of the Latin alphabet, casting and point systems, and the types of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries surveyed country by country -- Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, and England -- together with discussions of Aldine italic, early roman and black-letter traditions, and German foundries; Volume II continues with Netherlandish, Spanish, English (including Caslon, Baskerville, and other founders), Italian, and French types through the eighteenth century, followed by studies of the Didot family, Bodoni, the nineteenth-century classical revival, and English and American types from 1800 to 1844, concluding with chapters on industrial conditions of the printing trade, censorship, production rates, and a chronological list of specimens, notes, and index. Extensively illustrated with 367 plates reproducing type specimens, title-pages, and typographic details, the work combines historical narrative with detailed typographical analysis and remains a foundational reference for typographers, book historians, and students of printing.

Seller Inventory # 009808

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use. A Study in Survivals [2 vols, complete set]
• Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Publication Date: 1962
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Printing
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY