THE VISIBLE WORD: PROBLEMS OF LEGIBILITY
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer: THE VISIBLE WORD: PROBLEMS OF LEGIBILITY. New York: Visual Communications Books, 1969. Second edition [revised from a report published in June 1968 in a restricted edition by the Royal College of Art]. Quarto. Black paper cover boards decorated in white. 108 pp. Black and white illustrations as well as numerous type examples. Black covers lightly scratched. A very good or better copy. 8.5 x 12 hardcover book with 108 pages well illustrated with black and white illustrations and type examples. This is the second edition, revised (1969) of a report prepared as part of a programme of research into the readability of print in information publishing, sponsored by the International Publishing Corporation, and first published in June 1968 in a restricted edition by the Royal College of Art in London.
Contents:
- Introduction
- Investigating Legibility
- Some Results of Research
- The Relationship Between Content and Form
- Capitals Versus Lower Case
- Bold Face Types
- Italics
- Numerals
- Punctuation Marks
- Type Size, Line Length and Leading
- Unjustified Settings
- Paragraphs and Indention
- Margins
- Page Size
- Non-Horizontal Alignment
- Paper and Ink
- Summary
- Towards A New Alphabet
- Glossary
- Bibliography
THE VISIBLE WORD was the result of Spenceršs work as a senior research fellow at the Royal College of Art, from 1966 to 1978. He set up the Legibility Research Unit there, and working with the late Brian Coe and Linda Reynolds explored the problem with equal thoroughness and objectivity. The result -- that people read most easily the kind of lettering that they are most used to -- surprised no one, least of all Spencer, but much was learned from his lucid demonstration.
Urbane, prolific and unfailingly modest, Herbert Spencer (1924 - 2002) was a reformer dedicated to improving standards of design in a field dominated by the printing industry's outdated conventions. But he was also an aesthete with a connoisseur's eye for the wild modernist innovations with letterforms and layout of the 1920s. Spencer launched the seminal publication, Typographica, in 1949, when he was 25, and edited, designed and sometimes wrote for it for 18 years. Equally at home publishing one of the first articles in Britain about concrete poetry (then an international phenomenon), or an illustrated study of the design challenges presented by Braille, he was a new kind of designer-editor, able to think both visually and verbally, and to fuse images and words in meaningful new relationships.
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
out of stock