I’ve been spending all of my reading time with school-related texts lately, so it seemed like time for a little break. What luck that this book came up in conversation the day I finished the Bringhurst book.

Based off the 1950s girl detective novels, Maney recasts Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames as lesbians using the same “golly gee” inflection of the original stories. As a result character comments like “Have a gay time in San Francisco!” become downright hilarious.

I like a book I can polish off in a day now and then.

Parts of this book are so poetic and idealistic about typography and other parts are technical to intense mathematical degrees that it’s sure to be a good reference for both inspiration and precise guidance. If you have a nerd-level interest in typography, that is. There’s a whole section about page proportions derived from the chromatic scale, and half the book is devoted to detailed appendices concerning typefaces, designers, foundries, etc. Of course, the design of the book itself is beautiful that it’s enjoyable just to flip through the pages.

This book is likely to retain its place as a design classic, as Chappell recorded a uniquely specific point in history, balancing at the point before computers completely infiltrated design, leaving printing presses and typesetting machines to archaism. This is a history of printing starting with the earliest alphabets evolving through the advances of the printing press, with due given to major contributors to typographic design.

It’s hard not to wonder what Chappell (who died in 1991) would think of the world of design today when he closes, saying,

It is equally imperative that the results of applying modern technology to presswork be constantly measured against the most primitive printing, so that the lessons of the importance of impression and stiff ink may continue as standards for the appearance of words on paper. The key to the comparison should rest in the answer to the question: “Does the page look like an original?” A good page of letterpress printing is an original. It is not a picture of a page of type, it is not a reduction, it is an impression made from the type itself, or a direct casting from it.

There’s a new edition of this book with an additional chapter by Robert Bringhurst (author of another typography standard, The Elements of Typographic Style), which apparently overviews digital progress over the last twenty years, as well as newfound information on typographic history. Obviously, I got an older edition.

I kept hearing this one mentioned by various people with that certain weighty esteem that only favorites get, so I wanted to know why people loved it so. It is, quite simply, about a time traveler’s wife, or really, a time traveler and his wife, as the story seesaws between their perspectives. Despite the vague incredulity of a person’s chromosomes making him shift in time, the book has a similar delightful mindfuck quality as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s hard to comment too much on the plot without destroying the fun, but Niffenegger does an excellent job of establishing a shifting linearity and keeping it coherent.

All the pop culture, or moreso the not-quite-mainstream, pop-culture references gives a very modern feel, in the sense that I wonder how this will stand up over time. For some reason I kept picturing this book being taught in high school English classes in 20 years with teachers explaining who the Violent Femmes were—though I guess there are a lot more aspects of the book that would probably prevent that from ever happening. In the earlier parts of the story, those references give a more textured context to the time shifting, making every present more alive, but of course, once things start moving into the area of things that hadn’t yet happened (i.e., anything past the early 2000’s when the book was written), these references disappear. As that is largely when the story starts to wind down, it does lend an appropriately thinning quality to the story.