Quotes from Simon Garfield

These days, digitization enables us to view the copies [of the Gutenberg Bible] online without the need for a trip to the Euston Road, although to do so would be to deny oneself one of the great pleasures in life. The first book ever printed in Europe - heavy, luxurious, pungent and creaky - does not read particularly well on an iPhone.

Of course you can judge a book by its cover; moreover, we are obliged to.

One thing was for sure: no one wanted a repeat of Christopher Barker's Bible of 1631, which omitted the negative from the seventh commandment so that it read, 'Thou shalt commit adultery.

The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences' he wrote. 'No one can say that the O's roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or a girl's breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things

In 1979 the New York Times reported that in many {New York Subway} stations, the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all - a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves.

And that's the challenge for all of us – to create warmth in a digital world.

Type has rhythm, just like music.

the book typographer's job was building a window between the reader inside a room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a stained glass window of marvelous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be look at, not through.

Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography published by CUP in 1907 was printed in Caslon

Everybody wants to design a bloody typeface.

But now with young kids – there are so many more nerds.

Most people take the way words look for granted ... Words are there to be read – end of story. Once however typomania sets in, it becomes quite a different story.

You clock in to the clock. You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock. You eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock . . . You do that for forty years of your life, you retire, what do they fucking give you? A clock!

The truly perfect pangram would contain all the letters of the alphabet in the right order, but the only thing that achieves that is the alphabet. There are phrases that use fewer characters, but they are not as catchy. And this is not for want of trying. Here are two of the shortest: 'Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.' 'Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow.

But nostalgia was the first disease associated with time, its victims longing for days gone by.7

industry without art is brutality".

O cambiarte el nombre por Neville Brody. Si fueras él, habrías entrado a trabajar en la revista londinense The Face en 1981 y habrías transformado su diseño, asaz predecible, de manera tal que tu estilo reverberaría no solo en otras revistas sino en libros, discos y otros muchos aspectos del diseño comercial de las siguientes décadas.

Todavía no hemos acabado? ¿Por qué necesitamos todas estas fuentes nuevas? La respuesta, entonces y ahora, es la misma: porque el mundo y lo que contiene están en perpetuo cambio. Necesitamos poder expresarnos de nuevas maneras.

Conserving national resources was a sensible wish; it became a prescient necessity when the US entered the war six years later. But the desire to make the country great again may have appeared a tired political slogan even then. The belief of a better past is clearly a compelling one, but whether the past was better in the days of Taylor and Roosevelt in 1911 or in the mind of Donald Trump in 2016 is difficult to say.

We're still analogue beings. Our brains and eyes are analogue.

I, for one, do not wish to live in a world where everything is planned: I would much rather have liberty to make a fool of myself than become an ideal citizen by regulation. - George Taylor

Beatrice Warde: "La copa de cristal o por qué el arte de la impresión debe ser invisible". Su teoría, sencilla pero contundente, defendía que incluso el mejor tipo de letra existía solo con el objetivo de comunicar una idea. No había sido creado para ser visto y mucho menos para ser admirado. Cuanto más visible la fuente o la maquetación de una página, peor la tipografía. (...) Cuanto más transparente el cristal, más se apreciará su contenido.

I've come across studies that show a fascinating tendency of white-collar workers to inflate their work hours.' This applied particularly to those employed in what she calls 'white-collar sweatshops', the traditionally punishing arenas of finance and tech.

Las preguntas más importantes que debemos hacernos a la hora de elegir y valorar un tipo son: ¿se ajusta a la función que se le ha asignado? ¿Transmite el mensaje? Y ¿añade belleza a este mundo?