Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography

Paul Luna is Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading, UK, and author of Typography: A Very Short Introduction (2018). He has written on the relationship between typography and lexicography, and for many years directed the design of English and bilingual dictionaries at Oxford University Press.Fiona Ross is Professor in Type Design at the University of Reading, UK. With a background in languages and Indian palaeography, she specializes in type design for Arabic, South Asian, and Thai writing systems. Fiona has received the SoTA Typography Award (2014) and the Type Director’s Club Medal (2018).Aaris Sherin is an educator, writer, and designer. She is Professor of Graphic Design at St John’s University, New York, USA, and the author of Sustainable Thinking (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Introduction to Graphic Design (Bloomsbury, 2017).Vaibhav Singh is an independent researcher, typographer, and type designer. Previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and chairman of the Printing Historical Society, he is the editor of the journal Contextual Alternate and co-editor of the Bloomsbury research series Notes on Typography.Sue Walker is co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and director of the Lettering, Printing, and Graphic Design Collections in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, UK. Her research interests are in book design for young people and the relationship between typography and language.

This substantial volume establishes a new benchmark within the field, offering detailed historical and empirical research and critical scholarly analysis not only of the myriad variations in letterforms, but also of the underlying typographic systems employed in typesetting. This book is an indispensable resource for scholars, designers, and practitioners involved in typography as the production of language.

• Introduction1. The skeletons and dresses of writing systems: A (grapho)linguistic perspective on graphic structure and variationDimitrios Meletis2. Putting the world’s writing systems into print: Triumphs and tribulationsGraham Shaw3. The origin and development of early Chinese movable typeXunchang Cheng4. Type design as a collaborative process with particular reference to South Asian scriptsFiona Ross5. A framework for research-informed typeface design: Starting with GreekGerry Leonidas6. Analysing the typography of bilingual documents: Descriptive frameworks for graphical and spatial attributes of textKeith Tam7. Some influences on legibility: Who or what has changed notions of legibility through time?Mary C. Dyson , Niki Sioki, and Mila Waldeck8. The work of text in the age of digital information: Who (or what) makes typographic decisions?John Hudson9. The process of shaping text: An engineer’s perspectiveSimon Cozens10. Change in the digital type industryDan Rhatigan, Doug Wilson , and David Lemon11. The straitjacket of modernity : The New Nagari project and typeface design in IndiaVaibhav Singh12. Hebrew type designs of the 1950s : Typographic building blocks of a new nationAdi Stern13. The impact of Latinization on Armenian reading matter: A case study in newspapersElena Papassissa14. The peculiarities of Cyrillic letterforms: Design variation and correlation in Russian typefacesMaxim Zhukov15. Cyrillic beyond Russia: Four reflections in historyJohn Hudson16. Latin American vernacular letteringPriscila L. Farias17. Sea facing: Typography at the English seasideJustin Burns18. Drawing Ireland’s new typographic horizonsClare Bell19. Type-like: The special case of stencil workEric Kindel20. Analysing typographic meaning-making in urban spaces: Four illustrative case studiesIrmi Wachendorff21. Twentieth-century Black American design in contextGreg Bunbury22. The calligraphy, lettering, and typography of Louise E. Jefferson: A Black woman designer in twentieth-century AmericaTasheka Arceneaux-Sutton23. Experimental publishing: Alternative networked cultures and new archival initiativesRuth Blacksell24. The clothes words wear: Mapping meaning in dictionaries through typographyPaul Luna25. Aspects of inclusive text designSofie Beier26. Towards understanding diversity in Arabic typestyles: A study of readers’ preferences in Arabic typefaces for text compositionMohamad Dakak27. Infinite loops: On the contours of Chinese typeCaspar Lam and YuJune Park28. A Japanese typography primer: Unity from diversityMariko Takagi29. Hangeul, the script of expansion and harmonizationYanghee Ryu30. From reed to steel: The origins of nasta‘liq type-making in nineteenth-century Istanbul and CairoBorna Izadpanah31. Reading text in Square Kufic: Deciphering calligraphy in complex graphic formsMamoun Sakkal32. Secondary styles in Georgian typographyAna Sanikidze33. Modified Arabic scripts used by Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz speakers in Xinjiang, ChinaHuati Wulan34. Democratizing effective typographic expression: The role of Meitei Mayek in local and global communicationNeelakash Kshetrimayum35. Native American typography: Reinforcing cultural identityJuliet Shen36. A typeface design for Africa: Designing a multi-script typeface familyMark Jamra and Neil Patel37. Typography’s duty to language: Figurations of language in twentieth-century typographic discourseRobin Fuller