Simon Garfield

Just My Type is not just a font book, but a book of stories. About how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. About why Barack Obama opted for Gotham, while Amy Winehouse found her soul in 30s Art Deco. About the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, or people like Neville Brody who threw out the...

Comic Sans is one of the most used and most reviled typefaces of the digital age. How was it made? How could it spawn a movement to ban it and yet still be so widely promoted by educators? What does its accidental creator make of its contentious and singular history? This quirky and unique book considers how the computer transformed...

Maps fascinate us. They chart our understanding of the world and they log our progress, but above all they tell our stories. From the early sketches of philosophers and explorers through to Google Maps and beyond, Simon Garfield examines how maps both relate and realign our history. With a historical sweep ranging from Ptolemy to Twitter, Garfield explores the legendary,...

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours. The horrors of war are frozen at...

1856. Eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin's experiment has gone horribly wrong. But the deep brown sludge his botched project has produced has an unexpected power: the power to dye everything it touches a brilliant purple. Perkin has discovered mauve, the world's first synthetic dye, bridging a gap between pure chemistry and industry which will change the world forever. From the...

One of the most beautiful handcrafted typefaces in the world, Albertus is also one of the most enduring. The face of thousands of book jackets, and the chosen look for David Bowie, Coldplay, Star Wars and London street signs, Albertus is as warmly enticing on film posters as it is on memorial plaques. The story of the font is one...

The classic elegant English typeface, still widely used as a book text more than 250 years since its creation. Baskerville is a transitional design, poised between the first metal types and modern styles, notable for its combination of fat and thin strokes. When it was first used, there was genuine concern that it would damage readers' eyes. John Baskerville was...