I bought this book about a year ago, allowed my cousin to borrow it, and he didn't return it fast enough, so I bought a second copy! I love this book. Every time I pick it up I find someting I didn't see before. It's inspiration, educational and just, well...just wonderful. And the cover is stunning.

I am a working student in graphic design for web and print as well as web site design. Because I need to work I dont have time to work through books cover to cover. It seems that I'm allways trying to extinguish the "fire of the day" and I refer to my books for fire fighting techniques. With more experience hopefully I'll have most of these techniques in my brain...

I love this book because it makes type interesting. The book is beautiful and it inspires me to create work on the same level. It also helps me understand how to create the work to which I aspire.

One reviewer wrote that the cover is "aweful". I disagree. I love the cover. I love the design of the stretched mesh, the embossing, the spot coating, the colors and how it all contrast while remaining one united piece of work. The texture, colors, techno(mesh), modern(logo), hard(dies), and soft (script text) elements are individually interesting and combine wonderfully.

Bob in NJ

If you are a fine or graphic artist, a signmaker or architect-- even a historian, anthropologist or architect-- then you simply have to have this book. Stop looking for a book more complete in its study of the letterform and how it applies to our daily lives; it doesn't exist. Leslie Cabarga, the great California designer instrumental in resurrecting an appreciation for Art Deco since the 1970's, has outdone himself with this book.

From mankind's earliest handwritten symbols to today's graffiti and grunge sensibilities, Cabarga knows it all, and tells it all, here for you.

You don't have to be a "fonts guy" to love this book. Though I guarantee, you will slaver to be one by the time you finish this book.

And finish the book you will gratefully do, for never has a more beautiful book on fonts and letterforms been designed. Every single page is a gem lovingly conceived from Cabarga's sublimely gifted afflatus... The cover of the hardcover book alone took my breath away.

Typefaces, as you will learn, are an entire language-- a code-- of their own, regardless of what words they spell out. Cabarga helps you understand the sensibility of writing words as well as what literal sense they might make.

This book is filled with the kind of subtleties and counsels that only a master like Cabarga could impart; the little "secrets" and rules-of-thumb that more pedantic texts of yore would never convey.

Think you're hip? Leslie Cabarga is as hip as you are, if not more so, so if you want to make the coolest most bleeding-edge website, bookcover, CD cover or poster out there, the knowledge that you will glean betwixt these covers will arm you with the right skills. Yet this knowledge is grounded in the soundest historical framework of letter-making. That's Mr. Cabarga's unique gift to the world.

"Jaw-droppingly beautiful" and "useful" are not hyperbolic phrases in reference to this book. Your ultimate fontface, type and letterform teacher awaits you... Dare you seize the challenge, claim the gift?

I love this book. Informative, educational, thought-provoking, and very funny. The author's tone makes reading this book a lot of fun. Unless you already know the ins and outs of fonts, font-making, and the history of font design, you'll get something out of this book.