Books like Writing & illuminating, & lettering by Edward Johnston

A modern reference for typographers, blending theory, history, and practice with black‑and‑white illustrations, a glossary, and appendices. The second edition adds digital typography, deeper typeface coverage, and expanded history.

A comprehensive guide to graphic design and typography, offering practical advice and design techniques for students and designers alike.

An in‑depth guide to type design that covers structure, optical compensation, legibility, and the relationships between letters and shapes. It includes diagrams, historical context, and practical rules for creating serif, sans‑serif letters, numbers, and punctuation.

Writing is perhaps humanity's greatest invention. Without it there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. The Story of Writing is the first book to demystify writing for the general reader. In a succinct and absorbing text, Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol and script, and goes on to discuss each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs to alphabets and the scripts of China and Japan today. He explores "proto-writing," including Ice Age symbols, tallies and Amerindian pictograms, and surveys the astonishing multiplicity of alphabets - not only Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic and Indian scripts, but also the Cherokee "alphabet" and the writing of runes. Full coverage is given to the story of decipherment, and how the words of past ages have been brought back to life through the efforts of Champollion, Ventris and others. And in a provocative chapter devoted to as yet undeciphered scripts, Andrew Robinson challenges the reader: can the code of the Indus script, Cretan Linear A, the Phaistos Disc or Easter Island ever be broken? Armchair decipherers who read this book will be well placed to make discoveries that herald the next breakthrough.