Letter by Letter

This is a brilliant book on the history of letters and lettering. I could have done without the chakras, but everything else was to the point and fascinating. This is a learned and beautiful book.

This is a joy to read or peruse. Visually beautiful. Very entertaining, even insightful. But, I have some serious reservations about some of the historical claims. The book attempts a sweeping historical perspective by making many grand historical claims. You'll find that many better dictionaries give a history of individual letters of the alphabet. And they don't mesh particularly well with some of the claims of Laurent Pflughaupt. Moreover, the persistence of certain kinds of claims by Pflughaupt suggests to me a certain religious/historical bent (or bias, perhaps).

That said, I'm no expert on the history, so feel free to disregard my gripes. One way or another, the book is a pleasure to read at length or just to browse.

"Letter by Letter" by Laurent Pflughaupt lays bare its author's passion for the origins and anatomy of lettering. Pflughaupt guides us, from "History" (ancient Cuneiform to the Roman alphabet) and thence to modern styles, in a succinct 18 pages. Then he plunges into his passion, supplying a "genealogy" for the twenty-six letters we think we know so well -- his "Letter by Letter" section. Here he explains origins and transformations of these ancient and modern symbols that have conveyed the richness of human communication through recorded history. Indeed, these letters were, and remain, the iconic symbols by which much of that history was recorded and recalled.

One wishes for more. For example, discrete symbols in Old English sounded out the diphthongs "th" and "gh." They disappeared when Gutenberg's moveable type imposed standardized forms. Never mind; regional variants abounded across Europe, and Pflughaupt's focus is the Roman twenty-six.

In 1963, Ben Rosen asked his former teacher, designer Will Burtin, to contribute the Foreword for Rosen's book, "Type and Typography: The Designer's Type Book." Rosen's book predates Pflughaupt's "Letter by Letter" ("Lettres Latines," 2003) by forty years, but Burtin's comments about Rosen's fonts also apply to Pflughaupt's letters. Burtin wrote: "Each typeface is a piece of history, like a chip in a mosaic that depicts the development of human communication. Each typeface is also a visual record of the person who created it -- his skill as a designer, his philosophy as an artist, his feeling for ... the details of each letter and the resulting impressions of an alphabet or a text line." Burtin might have been writing a prequel for Pflughaupt's "Letter by Letter" while commending his passion for those letters. Every student of type and typography should read "Letter by Letter" -- more than once.

Robert Fripp, co-author of
"Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin"