Hello all!
I was out of town last week, which made it difficult to find time to work on my SRP, but I'm back on track and ready to roll now.
I'm making some really cool discoveries about the history of type. Though the public libraries have a nonexistent typography section, I'm managing to make use of the two books I do have on design and type. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst takes a fine-toothed comb to every detail of type. This is considered the definitive work on basic typesetting and design. American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century by Mac McGrew is a coffee-table volume of hundreds of fonts, and contains both samples and extensive histories on their design. These two big guys have gotten me through a lot of hassle. Would you believe that not everything can be Googled?
That's one of the biggest challenges with this project. I'm trying to assemble something huge here! By the end of this project I expect to assemble the philosophy of feelings behind a ton of different type styles.
Here's one last little thing I noticed. When I look at the history of a typeface, I don't just look up its name. You find so much more hidden in the details when you look at everything happening around the person who made it, or the era it was made in. For Eagle, it was the Depression. Nicolas Jenson? He knew Gutenberg and then fled Germany to continue his work! This is the important part; looking at the history. We do this for art history, why not for type?
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