Alphabets To Order. The Literature of Nineteenth-Century Typefounders' Specimens.

London: British Library, 2000,

First Edition. quarto, cloth in dust jacket. 222pp. British Library, New. Item #10294

Specimen books issued by typefounders to show their styles of type available for sale also revealed a lot about the reading habits, politics, amusements and whimsies of the British and North American founders in the nineteenth century. Combing typographic scholarship and literary criticism, Alastair Johnston presents and discusses hundreds of examples of texts that show the founders' interests and preoccupations, from the arcane to the mundane. Johnston also traces paths that have since been explored by concrete poets, book artists, dadaists, nonsense poets, performance artists and other marginal users of letterforms.

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