Adrian, Kyle, Bennett, and I had the great pleasure of being exposed to Robert Bringhurst’s amazing volume on the life of type during our collective school days. The Elements of Typographic Style is generally regarded as a contemporary classic on the subject, and is perhaps one of the more lyrical assessments of the many ways writing contines to live within its many typographic costumes.

Among several delights which occured during my graduate studies over the previous two years, it was a special pleasure to see and hear Bringhurst in person talking about several of his new areas of focus and study and just skim the surface of the analysis he was working on which appears to have now come to life as The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning.

The little I know about this is that it will likely deal with at least a partial cosmology of type itself - Bringhurst showed some profoundly cryptic slides of a classification system he’d developed which seemed to include both a sense of where a type form may have originally derived from and what purposes from that original nature continued to survive in it as well as more general taxonomic details (form, family, common characteristics, etc.) No guarantee that any of this has specificly shown up in this book, but just a hunch that may be worth following…

Having been a poet long before he had direct interest in typography, Bringhurst maintains this poetic voice even when writing about type. Though not afraid to dive head-first into the most technical aspects of typographic form, he’s equally unafraid to come out of it with a sense of the philosophical and of the melody of type as well. A beautiful, if at moments complicated and robust, examination of this curious vessel for history, culture, language, and expression…

I also Googled into this excellent interview with Bringhurst this morning…

It’s just such a joy to revel in the glories of type - David, a specific thanks for sharing your lovely images of the Pompeiian types and for the discussion of the way those chisel blows still echo in contemporary printed forms around us. I’d not heard the mention of the brush having been involved before the chisel came on the scene - I’d simply taken it as fact that the chisel formed the serif all along. It makes a great deal of sense, however, that the forms would need to be laid on the stone to guide the carvers, and the brush was certainly all the rage at the time…