[PR] New books from Oak Knoll Press

[ktinkel]

I just received the Oak Knoll press catalog for spring/summer 2005, with some especially appealing new titles (to me, anyway), including these two:

• Printer’s Type in the Twentieth Century: Manufacturing and design methods, by Richard Southall. Discusses the evolution of type production from hand punchcutting through all its stages to today’s digital forms and the implications for design. [hard covers, $60]

• Book Typography, by Ari Rafaeli, an examination of “the essential factors of a well-designed book” and including a historical survey of the classical book faces from Monotype and Linotype with comments on today’s digital versions. [hard covers, $35]

The catalog also includes some of their older books, including reprints of such classics as these: Updike’s Printing Types, S.H. Steinberg’s Five Hundred Years of Printing, Mac McGrew’s American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century (all three available in both paper and hard covers); and John Carter and Nicolas Barker’s ABC for Book Collectors (8th edition), in paper.

Oak Knoll is an antiquarian book dealer with a serious specialty in books about printing. It is also a publisher, in partnership with The British Library (and some others), of books on (to quote their slogan) “preserving the art and lore of the printed word.”

Oak Knoll books are rarely inexpensive (although they do have periodic sales for regular customers), but tend to be written by experts (often clearly out of a passion for their subjects), and are well printed and bound.

Most of the books are available through Oak Knoll in the U.S. and from The British Library in the U.K.