Typography

book presented to Maximilian I

typography, the design, or selection, of letter forms to be organized into words and sentences to be disposed in blocks of type as printing upon a page. Typography and the typographer who practices it may also be concerned with other, related matters—the selection of paper, the choice of ink, the method of printing, the design of the binding if the product at hand is a book—but the word typography without modifier most usually denotes the activities and concerns of those most involved in and concerned with the determination of the appearance of the printed page.

Thus understood, there was by definition almost—but not quite—no typography before the invention of printing from movable type in the mid-15th century, and, thus understood, it is only by analogical extension that the term can be applied, if ever it can be, to “reading” in which the material at hand is something other than words that remain stationary on flat firm surfaces. The electronically created letter that lives out its brief life while moving across the face of a signboard or a cathode-ray tube is not a typographic item. Typography, then, exists somewhere between the extreme of manuscript writing, on the one hand, and the transient image on the electronic device, on the other hand. Whether the letter be made by metal type or photographic image is no longer important in defining the subject, and whether the finished item is a book or a page influences its inclusion as typographic not one bit.