In a way, this book is an exercise in self-justification. Half-way through, Potter condenses his experiences into a set of precepts – ‘Start always at zero. Anonymity, Particularity. No truck with taste, style, eclecticism, magazines, picture books’ – which all designers would do well to read before embarking on yet another piece of lucrative mediocrity.

It would, however, be unfair to give the impression that this subtle and beautiful book is simply about one man’s design output and theories. Potter is a poet, even when he is not writing poetry. There are some perceptive digressions on music and particularly concert pianists, a delightful vignette of Ernest Gimson wearing thin white gloves the better to feel the surfaces of a piece of furniture and urging his students to ‘treat their edges kindly’, and some valuable reminiscences of that marginal genius, the typographer Anthony Froshaug. Embedded here, too, is a triangular love affair between Potter, his wife Caroline and his Dominion Universal Woodworker. The Dominion won.
Alastair Best, Blueprint, no. 69, 1990

I was surprised by this book. I’ve known Norman Potter, very slightly, since he arrived at my house one day in the fifties, battered by the wind, having driven from London to Manchester in an open jeep. Since then I half read his book, What is a designer, which irritated me somewhat, but apart from that I knew little of his work. Now that I’ve read this book, a carefully composed record, almost an epic poem, of his life and his thinking, I see that he is a member of the English artist-moralist tradition, akin to Eric Gill, embodying in his way of doing things a complete conception of life. He is a powerful critic (though barely recognized) of the culture and of the time and is the originator of a design method of great integrity and interest.

This is a very lovely book, a work of hand and machine, a work of thought and dedication. I know of nothing like it.

John Chris Jones, Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 2, 1991