When I started in book publishing, many, many years ago, books weren’t designed by graphic designers. They weren’t designed by people who called themselves book designers or typographers much either. I’m talking about the UK, here. In the US they have long employed specialist book designers, much to the detriment of their books. If your only job is to design books, there is a strong temptation to make your books stand out and this is generally a bad thing for at least two reasons: (1) the traditions of book design have grown up for good reasons to do with convenience and readability - to ignore them is to risk compromising these benefits; (2) good typography is a subtle and modest art, more blushing bride than Braggadocio. To this day, it is hard to find even a simple crime novel designed in the US which is not a monument to typographical ignorance and personal vanity. No unnecessary quirk or gimmick is left unattempted.

In the UK, in days of old, most books were designed by production managers and their minions, people who breathed lead, antimony and tin, bathed in printer’s ink and drank dragon’s blood. Not all were great designers, of course, but a surprising number of them were. They understood type, its history and subtleties. As book design was freed from the physical restraints of metal type, a new breed of book designers grew up. Often they came from a graphic design background and understood nothing about type and they embraced the very worst of the new photosetting faces - Souvenir and ITC Garamond to name but two.

This Christmas I have come across three books which suggest that things are getting even worse. I shall need more time to discuss these, or at least the worst of them, so, until another day...