The Design of Books

by Adrian Wilson

Wilson is one of a handful of book designers who brought the West Coast to the admiring notice of the world of typography. In 1983 he received a MacArthur Prize. This nice, practical, inexpensive reprint, with a new foreword by Sumner Stone, brings back into print a classic on layout, type, paper, printing, binding. Essential to any collection on the book. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[H James · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a lot to like in this book, but it requires patient teasing‐out because Mr Wilson meanders carelessly between design objectives, which are so slow to change within the world of book design that they remain useful for decades or centuries, and design processes, which have been so thoroughly overturned since 1974 that his recommendations are now entirely irrelevant except as a historical artifact. Also detrimental to this volume’s success is the image resolution, which is insufficient for the scale of images used. Many, many examples are largely irrelevant due to their illegibility.

With that said, Mr Wilson should be commended for his good design advice and, more unusually, his prioritization of making thoughtful case‐by‐case decisions rather than blindly following the sorts of hard ‘rules’ that so many other designers prescribe when trying to pass on their knowledge.

[David W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was particularly pleased that he included a discussion of Penguin Books and a reference to Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing, which I have in the 1961 edition.