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A journey through the world of typography with graphic designer Michael Bierut

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Playing to Type

 January 2008

By Virginia Postrel

"Given its subject, Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, published last May by Princeton Architectural Press, is remarkably plain. It has no pictures. It isn’t oversized. It doesn’t even have a dust jacket.

Yet the book is a graphic extravaganza. Each of the 79 essays is set in a different typeface, ranging in age from Bembo, designed in 1495, to Flama, created in 2006. This profusion of typefaces would have been inconceivable when Bierut, 50, was starting out as a graphic designer. 'I’m not sure in 1982 I could have come up with 79 different text fonts,' he says."    

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