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Typography inspiration found at the TDC Book Fair
| May 29, 2009


The TDC Book Fair (May 29th—30th, 2009), provides an intimate environment to browse new book titles in the specialized areas of book design, printing, typography, and lettering arts. But the highlight for me was seeing the beautiful antiquarian books, and vintage type specimen booklets. Large bookstores and fairs can sometimes be overwhelming—it was a nice change to have space to turn pages freely (even for the antiquarian fragile books) and have conversations directly with book, lettering and design professionals. Hopefully the Type Directors Club Book Fair will be a new annual tradition in New York City.

I have a tendency of purchasing more books than I have room for, but it's a hard habit to break. Below are a few photographs of what I ended up taking home:



(above is a promo for Mark Batty Publisher)






I found the Yearbook of the Plimpton Press (1911) very unique because it has 9 actual
book covers pasted into the book. (a few more photos on flickr)






The Handy Book of Artistic Printing: A Collection of Letterpress Examples 
(published by Princeton Architectural Press) was in my Amazon wish list for months. Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas (the designers and authors of the gorgeous book) were at the TDC signing copies of their new book, but unfortunately I just missed them.


To support the TDC, I also purchased an old annual from 1987. The pages are filled with designs by Louise Fili, Carin Goldberg, and Charles Spencer Anderson (pre- csadesign). 




The TDC table also had a large stack of old type specimen books for ITC. I bought only two—betting that someone will buy up the rest of the pile of 70s style specimens. (in April I attended the Ed Benguiat talk, so this swayed what I picked up)



Link:  inaugural TDC Book Fair

Tags:  books, graphic design, lettering, tdc, typography

Topic: Book Design

Creative Dialogue

2 Comments |[ Add Comment ]

Alvin Martinez
on May 30, 2009

I was actually right behind you when you purchased those 70’s specimen books. I ended up getting Century (which coincidentally I am using in a current project), ITC Modern and Cheltenham, as well as a 1200 page Linotype specimen book that I kept gravitating towards the entire time I was there. Once can only hope this is an annual event, as this is a rare opportunity to look at and purchase these types of books, although going to Oaklander’s offices on 28th street to look at their larger selection is certainly worth the trip.

 

Catherine Casalino
on May 31, 2009

Oooo! I didn't see that Plimpton Press one when I was there. Very nice! Thanks for sharing! I got two amazing type books from the 1920s & 30s. And salivated over some 1880s type specimens that were way out of my budget. There were so many nice books there! I had to stop buying when I realized I couldn't carry them all!

I went to the talk on Artistic Printing at the Grolier's club last week which was great, and picked up that book as well. Beautiful stuff.

- C

 

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