Just finished the Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
This book is to typographers as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding is to anyone who lifts weights. It's your holy book. It's the book everything else is measured against. It's definitive. It's a classic.
Bringhurst leaves no stone unturned in this tome. He covers absolutely everything you could conceive of that relates to typography. History, theory, best practices, specimens, it's all there. Fortunately for the reader, the bulk of it is actually theory-based. He gets into the most finest minutia regarding typesetting in English as well as foreign text. But he does so with wit, warmth and a great sense of readability. It's essentially a dry subject, but he handles it as well as anyone could hope to. He imbues it with personality, passion and professionalism. It's authoritatively written without being stodgy.
The book is very well-organized, and obviously very well laid out from a typographic perspective. It had to be pretty fucking spot-on to bolster Bringhurst's credibility. And it is.
You definitely can't just sit down and fly through this book. You just can't. It's essentially a text book. It's academic. It's hardly a Dan Brown page-turner. BUT he made the most out of it.
I learned a lot about things I was familiar with, and I was introduced to a million things I had never considered or even knew existed. Robert's knowledge is deep.
I took notes on my iPhone when I came across tips and tricks, and I shared those tidbits with my team at work.
This is a book with very esoteric knowledge. It's only for typographers/designers. No one else will give a flying fuck about it. And that's okay. It's not for you. But from a design perspective, I would say this is mandatory reading. I would recommend it to any designer young or old. I wish I had read it when I was in college, to be honest.
This is the gold standard.
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