Smeijers, a Dutch type- and graphic designer, knows what he is talking about. Not an ivory-tower theoretician, he has practised punchcutting intensively. This shows, for example, in his commentary on two chapters of Pierre Simon Fournier’s Manuel typographique of 1764, which Smeijers gives in an English translation and elucidates very instructively. The last part of the book extends the discussion to current type design and stresses the meaning of history for the present. Smeijers does not think that young designers nowadays must necessarily concern themselves with historical type, but he argues reasonably that they would profit from this.

Counterpunch is written in an entertaining manner and Smeijers’s ‘esprit’ frequently shines through – for which a compliment to the editor, Robin Kinross, is due. He revised the manuscript, largely written in English, without smoothing out the text too much. The carefully considered design, a bibliography, and a useful index complete a book that we can warmly recommend to anyone interested in type.
Kaspar Brand, Page [Hamburg], May 1997

It is no exaggeration that reading Counterpunch is fun. ... This book was not written for historians, ‘but for the makers and users of type,’ and anyone who has spent any amount of time intimate with the forms and counterforms of type will enjoy seeing the punchcutting experience through Smeijers’s eyes.
Angelynn Grant, Communication Arts, 1997

Counterpunch is a convincing argument, a strike back if you will, against the accepted theories of type design, history, and typography which have lead to a theory of mathematical precision in type forms that deadens their visual effect on the page.
Dan Carr, Matrix, 1997