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
Edited by:
Paul Luna (University of Reading UK),
Fiona Ross (University of Reading,
UK),
Aaris Sherin (St John's University,
New York,
USA),
Sue Walker (University of Reading,
UK),
Vaibhav Singh (University of Reading,
UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 248mm,
Width: 190mm,
Spine: 40mm
Weight: 1.680kg
ISBN: 9781350336384
ISBN 10: 1350336386
Series: Bloomsbury Visual Arts Handbooks
Pages: 528
Publication Date: 02 April 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction 1. The skeletons and dresses of writing systems: A (grapho)linguistic perspective on graphic structure and variation Dimitrios Meletis 2. Putting the world’s writing systems into print: Triumphs and tribulations Graham Shaw 3. The origin and development of early Chinese movable type Xunchang Cheng 4. Type design as a collaborative process with particular reference to South Asian scripts Fiona Ross 5. A framework for research-informed typeface design: Starting with Greek Gerry Leonidas 6. Analysing the typography of bilingual documents: Descriptive frameworks for graphical and spatial attributes of text Keith Tam 7. Some influences on legibility: Who or what has changed notions of legibility through time? Mary C. Dyson , Niki Sioki, and Mila Waldeck 8. The work of text in the age of digital information: Who (or what) makes typographic decisions? John Hudson 9. The process of shaping text: An engineer’s perspective Simon Cozens 10. Change in the digital type industry Dan Rhatigan, Doug Wilson , and David Lemon 11. The straitjacket of modernity : The New Nagari project and typeface design in India Vaibhav Singh 12. Hebrew type designs of the 1950s : Typographic building blocks of a new nation Adi Stern 13. The impact of Latinization on Armenian reading matter: A case study in newspapers Elena Papassissa 14. The peculiarities of Cyrillic letterforms: Design variation and correlation in Russian typefaces Maxim Zhukov 15. Cyrillic beyond Russia: Four reflections in history John Hudson 16. Latin American vernacular lettering Priscila L. Farias 17. Sea facing: Typography at the English seaside Justin Burns 18. Drawing Ireland’s new typographic horizons Clare Bell 19. Type-like: The special case of stencil work Eric Kindel 20. Analysing typographic meaning-making in urban spaces: Four illustrative case studies Irmi Wachendorff 21. Twentieth-century Black American design in context Greg Bunbury 22. The calligraphy, lettering, and typography of Louise E. Jefferson: A Black woman designer in twentieth-century America Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton 23. Experimental publishing: Alternative networked cultures and new archival initiatives Ruth Blacksell 24. The clothes words wear: Mapping meaning in dictionaries through typography Paul Luna 25. Aspects of inclusive text design Sofie Beier 26. Towards understanding diversity in Arabic typestyles: A study of readers’ preferences in Arabic typefaces for text composition Mohamad Dakak 27. Infinite loops: On the contours of Chinese type Caspar Lam and YuJune Park 28. A Japanese typography primer: Unity from diversity Mariko Takagi 29. Hangeul, the script of expansion and harmonization Yanghee Ryu 30. From reed to steel: The origins of nasta‘liq type-making in nineteenth-century Istanbul and Cairo Borna Izadpanah 31. Reading text in Square Kufic: Deciphering calligraphy in complex graphic forms Mamoun Sakkal 32. Secondary styles in Georgian typography Ana Sanikidze 33. Modified Arabic scripts used by Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz speakers in Xinjiang, China Huati Wulan 34. Democratizing effective typographic expression: The role of Meitei Mayek in local and global communication Neelakash Kshetrimayum 35. Native American typography: Reinforcing cultural identity Juliet Shen 36. A typeface design for Africa: Designing a multi-script typeface family Mark Jamra and Neil Patel 37. Typography’s duty to language: Figurations of language in twentieth-century typographic discourse Robin Fuller
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.
Reviews for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography
This substantial volume establishes a new benchmark within the field, offering detailed historical and empirical research and critical scholarly analysis not only of the myriad variations in letterforms, but also of the underlying typographic systems employed in typesetting. This book is an indispensable resource for scholars, designers, and practitioners involved in typography as the production of language. * Fraser Muggeridge, graphic designer and convenor of 'Typography Theory Practice' conference * An essential tool for understanding typographic history, practice, and theory on a global scale. * Eric Karnes, Drexel University, USA *
