Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography

This new handbook takes the broadest possible view of typography, defining it as ‘design for reading’. It considers all kinds of reading matter and visual communication systems; digital, environmental, printed, and produced by hand.

By offering a rich collection of texts that are genuinely international in authorship and in scope, it seeks to rebalance the Western bias of so many books on the subject. It gives space to new voices and emerging standpoints about the global nature of design, the needs of particular communities of readers, and about the need for inclusivity and historical understanding in design practice and research.

Thirty-seven chapters by forty-three contributors show the interdisciplinary range of research in typography today, exemplifying the relationship between history, theory, and practice that is at the heart of the discipline. They feature over 500 illustrations, mostly in colour, and full bibliographic references.

Topics include:
Typography and sociolinguistics
Frameworks for considering scripts and multilingual documents
Historical and contemporary Arabic-script typographic practice
Designing fonts for marginalized communities in Asia, Africa, and North America
The earliest movable type in China in the tenth century
Understanding Japanese and Korean typography
Approaches to legibility
Western influence on the typography of indigenous writing systems
Political and technological factors that shape typography
Experimental and commercial publishing contexts
The type design industry today
Typography in the environment

Paul Luna is Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading, UK, and author of Typography: A Very Short Introduction (2018). He has written on the relationship between typography and lexicography, and for many years directed the design of English and bilingual dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

Fiona Ross is Professor in Type Design at the University of Reading, UK. With a background in languages and Indian palaeography, she specializes in type design for Arabic, South Asian, and Thai writing systems. Fiona has received the SoTA Typography Award (2014) and the Type Director’s Club Medal (2018).

Aaris Sherin is an educator, writer, and designer. She is Professor of Graphic Design at St John’s University, New York, USA, and the author of Sustainable Thinking (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Introduction to Graphic Design (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Vaibhav Singh is an independent researcher, typographer, and type designer. Previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and chairman of the Printing Historical Society, he is the editor of the journal Contextual Alternate and co-editor of the Bloomsbury research series Notes on Typography.

Sue Walker is co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and director of the Lettering, Printing, and Graphic Design Collections in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, UK. Her research interests are in book design for young people and the relationship between typography and language.