Although the skeleton shapes of the letters of our alphabet hardly change, many skilled type designers have devoted much time, sometimes their whole lives, to drawing different versions of the outlines.

This book serves as an introduction to the concept of typefaces and to some of the personalities who have created them - Goudy, Rogers, Koch, Gill, Morison, Van Krimpen, Trump, Tschichold, Frutiger, and Zapf - and places them in the context of the enormous changes that have occurred this century in the methods of creating and setting type.

Profiles of a new generation of typographers working in the latter half of this century, such as Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone and others, bring the book up to date. Working with entirely different tools than their predecessors, they reflect the new typography in varying degrees.