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Explore Digital Edition of Printing Types from 1922

Times New Roman has been around since 1931, longer than most of us have been alive — and for longer than many of us have been alive, word-processing applications have come with it as the default font.

” In the book, Updike offers a his­to­ry of “the art of typog­ra­phy from the dawn of West­ern print­ing in the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry to the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth — focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on Euro­pean print­ing in Ger­many, France, Italy, the Nether­lands, Spain, and Eng­land as well as the Unit­ed States.” In trac­ing “the devel­op­ment of type design,” he also dis­cuss­es “the impor­tance of each his­toric peri­od and the lessons they con­tain for con­tem­po­rary design­ers.” Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1922 and exten­sive­ly revised in 1937, Print­ing Types long stood as the author­i­ta­tive his­to­ry of typog­ra­phy in the Latin alpha­bet, with its “more than 360 fac­sim­i­le illus­tra­tions show­cas­ing exam­ples of typog­ra­phy, bor­ders, flow­ers, and pages pulled from the books cov­ered.” Track­ing down the sources of those illus­tra­tions con­sti­tut­ed no small part of the painstak­ing pro­duc­tion of Rougeux’s dig­i­tal edi­tion, and the 100 of them most high­ly praised by Updike have also been made avail­able for pur­chase in poster form. For those who do a lot of work with text, in print or dig­i­tal forms, it could pro­vide just as much moti­va­tion as an actu­al copy of Print­ing Types on the shelf to find our way beyond the defaults.

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