Hans Rudolf Bosshard
Verl. des Bildungsverbandes Schweizerischer Typographen BST, Bern, 1985, German
Nonfiction, Graphic Design
ISBN: 9783855840113
On 1 book list
Erik Spiekermann

Bosshard is one of the grand old men of Swiss design and deserves to be better known abroad. This volume (“Mathematical Foundations of Typesetting”), along with Bosshard’s Technische Grundlagen zur Satzherstellung (“Technical Foundations of Typesetting”), would be my desert island typography books. They contain everything there is to be known about the mathematical and technical principles behind typesetting (as the German titles—these are not available in English—say). You can learn to add in hexadecimal, compare all the systems of proportion ever invented and the mathematical rules behind them, find out how to mark up type (a dead but important art), and look up the formats of books, magazines, and newspapers from around the world. I still have no idea how the author and his sons managed to gather and display all this information and live to write more books since.

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