CCSP Press, 2008
Read by Andy Brown
This is the flagship title of the new Atkins Library, a series of books about books published by CCSP Press, the brick and mortar arm of the respected SFU publishing school. So right away I am intrigued. A subject I can believe in. And the icing on the cake is that it is done by Robert Bringhurst, best known for his seminal The Elements of Typographic Style (1992), but also known as an accomplished poet and writer. Bringhurst brings his typographic eye to books by John Newlove, P.K. Page, Marshall McLuhan, Leonard Cohen, Jan Zwicky, Lisa Robertson, and of course their respective designers, with lush full colour reproductions of artwork and page layout.
Sometimes the image of the spread open book is centered spine to spine so there is a visual trick of looking at two books at once. But Bringhurst isn’t about visual tricks, his appetites are sober, classical, richly researched, and as such there is a bias toward the letterpress aesthetic: type heavy, second spot colours, woodcuts (by such luminaries as Frank Newfeld). In the back is an appendix of all the Alcuin Design Award winners. The same publishers come up again and again.
It’s great to see book page layouts in the format of a glossy art monograph. Ghost pages, stitched spines, watermarks. Some of these pages have enlarged microscope-shaped images to highlight the font choice, for which Bringhurst provides detailed notes. What is also great is the recognition of early Native language books, dictionaries of lost languages, documents of an oral culture. Bringhurst gives more than a passing nod to these publications and should be commended for it.
A fantastic debut from a quality new press.
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