Reviews

Ruari McLean

Thames and Hudson, ISBN: 0500680221  Publisher

This is a curious book, part tutorial, part cookbook, part personal war stories, including the author’s pet tools and techniques.  It was obviously designed before computers were commonplace and many sections dealing with hot metal type or phototypesetting are completely obsolete nowadays.

The beginning has a decent introduction to the history of typography and typefaces.

The middle part concerns itself with working around the constraints of metal or copyediting before word processing systems became commonplace. If nothing else, it should give us a renewed appreciation of how much tedious labor computers save us, such as not having to count characters to find out how many pages will be required.

The final part on layout for stationery, books and magazines is pretty good, but not very systematic, and carries the same war story flavor as the section on recommended tools.

All in all, this book has some interesting information, but I would not recommend it to anyone who wants to learn how to produce beautiful documents out of his desktop publishing setup. Robin Williams’s “The PC is not a typewriter”, Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographical Style” or even Donald Knuth’s books on computers and typography are better choices in this respect.

Ralph E Jacobson, Sidney F Ray, Geoffrey G Attridge, Norman R Axford

Focal Press, ISBN: 0240515749,  Publisher, Buy online.

This book is simply wonderful. It is a detailed and comprehensive treatise on the physical, optical, chemical and otherwise scientific theory behind photography (the authors all have a bevy of these wonderfully quaint British learned society titles, in addition to a hefty list of PhDs and graduate degrees). Also distinctive is that the first edition was published in 1890 and thus it spans three centuries!

That said, the coverage of the latest developments like digital photography is impressive, and this is one of the first photography textbooks that have been updated completely for the coming migration to digital, rather  than treating it as an afterthought.

I’ve been looking for a long time for such a book, that explains the theory without patronizing a scientifically literate reader. For instance, the book explains how ISO ratings are defined for film and for electronic sensors, how depth of field is computed, the diffraction limit on sharpness at small apertures and so on. If you are afraid of equations, this is not the book for you.