New Faces

From the introduction to Emily King’s doctoral thesis which focuses on typeface design in the United States, England and the Netherlands between 1987 and 1997.

"An anomaly amongst writing upon typography, this thesis is the work of a design historian rather than a typographic insider. For the most part, the history of type design has been the territory of those within the trade. Accounts of the development of letterform have appeared in their own right and been included within histories of printing, typography and later graphic design, but in spite of their variety, these studies almost uniformly fail to put the design of type and of printed material into any kind of broader cultural, economic or social context. Instead, they have tended to concentrate upon the evolution of form. In her book The Printing Revolution in Early modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein pointed out that, although the history of printing is an integral part of the history of civilisation, studies of the subject “are isolated and artificially sealed off from the rest of historical literature” and “are seldom consulted by scholars who work in any other field”.[1]

[1] p.4, Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 1983, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

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