Robert Bringhurst

Long the preserve of trained specialists alone, typography is now a territory open to everyone equipped with a computer. For millions, the ability to produce effective printed documents has lately become, like effective speaking and writing, an essential professional skill and an important source of personal satisfaction. Far more than a style guide, this book is a brief history of typographic art; a compact encyclopedia of typographic symbols, concepts and traditions; and a tour of the technologies employed, old and new. In all, it is a thoughtful and insightful desktop reference for everyone who works with written words. To writers, this book offers a whole new set of skills and tools for effective expression and communication. To readers, it offers a new dimension of reading: a deeper appreciation of letters and a deeper understanding of what they mean.--From publisher description.

The Elements of Typographic Style

Jan Zwicky

Two powerful writers draw upon philosophy to find a roadmap for grace and equanimity in the face of the death of our planet.

Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis

Learning to Die

"Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough." With this concise and broadly informative essay, renowned poet, typographer and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a brief history of writing and a new way of classifying and understanding the relationship between script and meaning. Beginning with the original relationship between a language and its written script, Bringhurst takes us on a history of reading and writing that begins with the interpretation of animal tracks and fast-forwards up to the typographical abundance of more recent times. The first four sections of the essay describe the earliest creation of scripts, their movement across the globe and the typographic developments within and across languages. In the fifth and final section of the essay, Bringhurst introduces his system of classifying scripts. Placing four established categories of written language - semographic, syllabic, alphabetic and prosodic - on a wheel adjacent to one another, he uses the location, size and shape of points on the wheel to show the degree to which individual world languages incorporate these aspects of recorded meaning. Bringhurst’s system is based on an appreciation that indeed no one’s hands are fast enough and that no single script adheres to or can be understood within the confines of a single method of transcription. Readers will find this combination of anthropology, typography, literature, mathematics, music and linguistics surprisingly accessible and thought provoking. The text is accompanied by diagrams and typographic examples that make for an experiential study of the relationship between writing and meaning. This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with a letterpress printed jacket. The book was designed by Robert Bringhurst and Andrew Steeves, and printed on Zephyr Laid paper. The cover was hand-printed letterpress on St. Armand handmade paper.

An Essay on Writing and Meaning

The Solid Form of Language

Escrita, projetada e composta pelo tipógrafo, ensaísta e poeta norte-americano Robert Bringhurst, esta obra reúne e discute em profundidade os conhecimentos que a história da tipografia ocidental transformou em tradição ao longo dos últimos 600 anos, respaldado por uma linguagem deliciosamente acessível, que a tornou uma unanimidade entre os designers gráficos do mundo inteiro. O título é inspirado em conceitos do filósofo Walter Benjamin.

Elementos Do Estilo Tipografico

Jan Tschichold

La forma del libro

Renowned typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst brings clarity to the art of typography with this masterful style guide. Combining the practical, theoretical, and historical, this edition is completely updated, with a thorough revision and updating of the longest chapter, "Prowling the Specimen Books," and many other small but important updates based on things that are continually changing in the field.

Gli elementi dello stile tipografico

The Tree of Meaning is a collection of thirteen lectures given by internationally-renowned poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst. Together these lectures present a superbly grounded approach to the study of language, focusing on storytelling, mythology, comparative literature, humanity and the breadth of oral culture. Bringhurst’s commitment to what he calls ‘ecological linguistics’ emerges in his studies of Native American art and storytelling, his understanding of poetry, and his championing of a more truly universal conception of what constitutes literature. The collection features a sustained focus on Haida culture (including the work of storytellers Skaay and Ghandl, and artist Bill Reid), on the process of translation, and on the relationship between beings and language. Spanning ten years of lecturing, The Tree of Meaning is remarkable not only for the cohesion of its author’s own ideas but for the synthesis of such wide-ranging perspectives and examples of cultures both human and non-human. These thirteen lectures draw together a highly personalized and active study of Native American art and literature, world languages, philosophy and natural history. To each subject Bringhurst brings an ecologically conscious, humanitarian approach and an enthusiastic interest in the world around him. “When the border guards ask, I say I’m a writer,” remarks Bringhurst. “If they ask still more, I’ll say I write both poetry and prose. That’s usually enough; they’ll shake their heads and wave me on. I wouldn’t attempt to tell them the truth, which is that writing is just a disguise. I do my work by talking to the air. Sooner or later the talk is disguised as writing and printing, because those are the simplest, least obtrusive ways of miming something spoken. “For poetry at least, speaking also seems to me a better delivery method than writing. Doing readings pays better than publishing books of poems. It reaches a wider audience too. It allows for nuances no typographer can match. And speaking is much older and more universal than writing. It seems to me a better venue, much of the time, for the evanescent, mutable agelessness that is apt to distinguish a poem. “So poems, where I come from, are spoken to be written and written to be spoken. The Tree of Meaning is a book of critical prose composed in the same way. “The book has several themes: the nature of language; the nature of meaning; the destruction of the earth as we have known it, occurring side by side with the evident persistence of poetry and meaning. And the book has an agenda connected to these themes. That agenda is learning to read and understand a few significant examples of Native American oral literature: works preserved often by accident, often in damaged form, which have, I think, a lot to teach us all. “In cultures that have writing, the usual way of capturing oral literature is to write it down and put it in a book. We’ve done that with the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Beowulf; we do it now with the works of Cree and Crow and Haida storytellers, phonetically transcribed in the past century and a half. It makes good sense to me that a book about oral literature should be spoken before it is written, and written to be spoken, not just read.”

Thirteen Talks

The Tree of Meaning

Poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst has worked for many years with these century-old manuscripts, which have waited until now for the broad recognition they deserve."--BOOK JACKET.

The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

A Story as Sharp as a Knife

William Reid

This new edition of a collaboration between one of the finest living artists in North America and one of Canada's finest poets includes a new introduction by the distinguished anthropologist Claude L�vi-Strauss. Ten masterful, complex drawings by Bill Reid and ten tales demonstrate the richness and range of Haida mythology, from bawdy yet profound tales of the trickster Raven to poignant, imagistic narratives of love and its complications in a world where animals speak, dreams come real, and demigods, monsters, and men live side by side.

The Raven Steals the Light

Warren Chappell

This work makes plain the evolution, impact and development of the printed word as we know it. Covering the earliest forms of the letters of the alphabet, to graphic technology today, this revised edition should appeal to designers, students and typophiles.

A Short History of the Printed Word

In March 2002, the Regina-based dance company New Dance Horizons performed Robert Bringhurst's Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers, a work that had been commissioned as part of an evening of modern performance and dance entitled Invisible Ceremonies. In Ursa Major, Bringhurst explores a polyphonic technique that allows multiple speakers -- and multiple languages and traditions -- to collaborate in the story's telling. The subject of the masque is Ursa Major, the great bear constellation, one of the most universal themes in world mythology. In setting the Cree tradition alongside the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome, Bringhurst demonstrates the richness of metaphor that North Americans have inherited. This publication is an attempt to express the masque's performance in typographic form.

A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers

Ursa Major

"The design and manufacture of books can tell as much about a people or a culture as the ambience of its streets and the architecture of its buildings."In our everyday lives, books surround us-even if we are among the many who never read another one after high school. Their very jacket design asks us to make meaning of their presence and, when we open them, the layout of words and stories within their covers makes us readers-even before we begin to read.To Robert Bringhurst, typographer, poet and writer, the presence of books and the story of books in Canada are preludes to understanding our culture.From the tattered book of Canadian poetry your moody cousin carried everywhere, to the pristine hardcover book of Atwood's latest work in your brainy co-worker's hands, book design says much about who and where we are as Canadians.In The Surface of Meaning, Robert Bringhurst takes us on another of his walking tours, this time through the bramble of English and French-Canadian books and book design, from the mid-18th Century to the present day. Along the way, he discovers a true "image trove" of identity, culture and history. And he does what no other work on books and publications does: He creates a truly national survey of Canadian books by bringing Canada's long history of Aboriginal story-telling into a context of "book". It is a context that goes into the depths of our prehistory, far beyond the printed page.The Surface of Meaning is a tribute to Canadian books and publishing. It is irresistible to readers who love books, as well as to designers and others, who may simply prefer to look at them.

Books and Book Design in Canada

The Surface of Meaning

In this companion volume to The Tree of Meaning, Robert Bringhurst collects twenty essays under the subversive principle that "everything is related to everything else." His studies build upon this sense of basic connection, and involve the work of poets, musicians, and philosophers as varied as Ezra Pound, John Thompson, Don McKay, Empedokles, Parmenides, Aristotle, Skaay, Plato, George Clutesi, Elizabeth Nyman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dennis Lee, and Glenn Gould. The value Bringhurst places on the process of translation, the dialogue between one language and another, and the sheer experience of witnessing translation by reading and hearing poems, stories, and songs in their original languages is another strong presence in this collection. Accompanying the English narrative are passages in Tlingit, Haida, Chinese, Greek, German, Cree, and Russian, for readers who want to find the patterns and taste some of the vocabulary for themselves, for those interested in meeting the languages partway.

Twenty Pieces of Thinking

Everywhere Being Is Dancing

A seminal collection of Haida myths and legends; now in a gorgeous new package. The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians from the fall of 1900 through the summer of 1901. Together they created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form. Having worked for many years with these century-old manuscripts, linguist and poet Robert Bringhurst brings both rigorous scholarship and a literary voice to the English translation of John Swanton's careful work. He sets the stories in a rich context that reaches out to dozens of native oral literatures and to myth-telling traditions around the globe. Attractively redesigned, this collection of First Nations oral literature is an important cultural record for future generations of Haida, scholars and other interested readers. It won the Edward Sapir Prize, awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and it was chosen as the Literary Editor's Book of the Year by the Times of London. Bringhurst brings these works to life in the English language and sets them in a context just as rich as the stories themselves one that reaches out to dozens of Native American oral literatures, and to mythtelling traditions around the world.

Elementarz stylu w typografii

Typographer, translator, cultural historian, poet, and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a taxonomic study of the many iterations of the typeface Herman Zapf's Palatino, along with a broader overview of the cultural history of type design. This is an important book, writes David R. Godine, "that argues, as eloquently and as convincingly as has ever been argued, that type design belongs squarely in the humanist tradition, that it is as much a member of the fine arts as painting and printmaking and calligraphy."

The Natural History of a Typeface

Palatino

In this companion volume to The Tree of Meaning, Robert Bringhurst collects twenty essays under the subversive principle that ?everything is related to everything else.” His studies build upon this sense of basic connection, and involve the work of poets, musicians, and philosophers as varied as Ezra Pound, John Thompson, Don McKay, Empedokles, Parmenides, Aristotle, Skaay, Plato, George Clutesi, Elizabeth Nyman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dennis Lee, and Glenn Gould. The value Bringhurst places on the process of translation, the dialogue between one language and another, and the sheer experience of witnessing translation by reading and hearing poems, stories, and songs in their original languages is another strong presence in this collection. Accompanying the English narrative are passages in Tlingit, Haida, Chinese, Greek, German, Cree, and Russian, for readers who want to find the patterns and taste some of the vocabulary for themselves, for those interested in meeting the languages partway.

Robert Bringhurst

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