20th-Century type

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John A. Lane

"The Plantin-Moretus Museum has one of the world's richest collections of type specimens, many surviving nowhere else. They include types by Garamont, Granjon, Van den Keere, Briot, Van Dyck, Kis, Fournier, Rosart, Gille, Didot and many other masters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Since the Plantin-Moretus printing office acquired most of the specimens when new, moreover, the collection as a whole tells a story in a way that collections assembled piecemeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot. Finally, the Museum's archives help to document the origins of many specimens." "This first detailed catalogue of the Museum's specimens reports the styles and sizes of type shown, describes the structures and paper stocks, notes relations with other specimens in the collection and elsewhere, and provides references to literature on many of the individual types shown." "Preliminary notes on the type founders and printers who issued the specimens include chronologies of the foundries and information on the origins of their materials, sometimes supplemented with information about the history of the firms and the genealogy of the founders. Nearly all of the nineteen specimens illustrated at their original size appear here for the first time, and extensive indexes make this book a powerful reference tool for type specimen enthusiast and printing historians."--BOOK JACKET.

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Bruce Michelson

"Trained as a printer while still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this technological revolution for culture and personal identity. Printer's Devil is the first book to explore these themes in some of Twain's best-known literary works and in his most daring speculations on American society, the modern condition, and the nature of the self. Playfully and anxiously, Twain often thought about typeset words and published images as powerful forces for political and moral change, personal riches and ruin, and epistemological turmoil. In his later years, Twain wrote about the printing press as a center of meta-physical power, a force that could alter the fabric of reality. Studying these themes in Mark Twain's writings, Bruce Michelson also provides a fascinating overview of the technological changes that transformed the American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime, changes that opened new possibilities for content, for speed of production, for the size and diversity of a potential audience, and for international fame. The story of Twain's life and art amid this media revolution is a story with powerful implications for our own time, as we ride another wave of radical change for printed texts, authors, truth, and consciousness."--Jacket.

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Gene Wolfe

This omnibus of two acclaimed novels is the story of Latro, a Roman mercenary who was fighting in Greece when he received a head injury that deprived him of his short-term memory but gave him in return the ability to see and converse with the supernatural creatures, the gods and goddesses, who invisibly inhabit the classical landscape. Latro forgets everything when he sleeps. Writing down his experiences every day and reading his journal anew each morning gives him a poignantly tenuous hold on himself, but his story's hold on readers is powerful indeed.

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Frederick J. Murphy

"Apocalypticism is not a specialized or peripheral topic in biblical studies. It represents the central, characteristic transformation of Hebrew thought in the period of the Second Temple and is the context in which the New Testament books were written. Frederick Murphy defines apocalypticism while discussing its origins, its expressions in the Hebrew Bible, and its bearing on Jesus and the New Testament. This text will be useful for students of early Christianity and will work well as a supplemental text for Second Temple Judaism, Hebrew Bible, and New Testament courses" -- Publisher description.