Before I ever touched a computer, I touched lead. I was a child in Brazil in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the weight of a form in my hands, the steel frame holding rows of metal letters and the thin strips of lead spacers that gave a line its breathing room. The compositors […]

The prose is the most important element—everything else is complementary. The purpose of book design is not to make pages beautiful. It is to make the prose beautiful to read. Most conversations begin one step too late: which font, how much margin, what goes on the cover. Those considerations are downstream of a prior one