The right type

This is the page from McCall's magazine  that featured the sundae glass.

I bought this in the early sixties and it's still a book I would recommend to anyone who wants learn about typographic finesse. Aaron Burns was the boss of the Composing Room, during the fifties and into the sixties. It was  New York's leading typesetting house for the graphic arts trade. I think it's worth saying that the contents reflect machine and hand-setting type, long before the computer but the fundamentals revealed in these pages are now just a few keystrokes away for anyone with a pc and the appropriate software.

The pages are divided into three sections. First a selection of type shown mostly as display setting for ads and editorial. Second an analysis of the pages in the first section showing the changes designers made to achieve the perfect setting. Third fundamentals covering spacing, alignment, punctuation, underscores, text setting, ragged lines, initials, combining faces, leading. This is a large book (fourteen by ten inches) and the 112 pages have plenty of examples of beautiful display typography whether it's some setting for an ad, editorial page or an order form for a chemical company.

Aaron Burns ended his introduction like this: Careful, constant, painstaking care and attention to every detail is necessary to achieve 'perfect' typography. Although the effort is great -- the reward is greater still for those who care!

*The only contemporary book I've seen that has much of Burns thoughts on typography is The complete manual of typography by James Felice and published by Adobe.