Meticulously researched, longform, immersive, deep-dives into the history of typography, book history, typographic firsts, and type design.
Fashion is a global, multi-billion dollar industry. From haute couture to five-dollar tees, it is inescapable — at least for those of us who wear clothes, that is. It is supported and promoted by vast publishing enterprises of glossy magazines and books and million-dollar advertising budgets. And although, arguably, we […]
Read More
Enigmatic Emblem Books were one of the best-selling literary genres of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Learn who invented them and why they were so popular.
Read More
The Renaissance affected change in every sphere of life, but perhaps one of its most enduring legacies are the letterforms it bequeathed to us. But their heritage reaches far beyond the Italian Renaissance to antiquity. In ancient Rome, the Republican and Imperial capitals were joined by rustic capitals, square capitals […]
Read More
For tens of thousands of years, humans have looked up at the night sky in awe, intrigued by the motion, manner, and nature of the stars. And with our propensity for pattern recognition and our proclivity for causal inference, or attributing meaning or significance to coincidence, we joined the dots, […]
Read More
Before the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century, women were involved in the production of manuscripts. The history of nuns working as scribes can be traced back to at least the third century. Read about the journey from manuscript to print and discover who exactly was the first female typographer.
Read More
We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin alphabet, the world’s most used abc. But why do the letters look the way they do? Why, how, where, and by whom was the alphabet invented. This is the alphabet’s story.
Read More