This and this, and this and this, show why it is safer to look at the website of the publisher of a book, rather than at one of the websites of the internet shop Amazon. Very small publishers, especially, tend to change the details of their books (number of pages, cover design, price) even weeks before publication, and they also tend not to have enough time to inform the big selling beast that these things have been changed since the book was first announced. For more on Amazon, and why it should be regarded with some doubt, see here. (Update, September 2007. By this time Amazon had found the final cover images of these books, and improved its description of them. So now we have to explain that the first and third links here were to provisional images and advance details. The mystery of the line ‘Buy this book by Nicolete giovanni M Gray today!’ remains. These words really did appear on the Amazon website, as if it is robots who write the script.)

A letter published in the London Review of Books, 2 August 2007.

We have received the first copies of Typography papers 7 in the office. It looks fine. Four-colour printing is used, for only the second time in Typography papers, for some pictures in Sue Walker’s article on letterforms for young readers in early twentieth-century English publications, and for a remarkable diagram made by Brian Coe, as part of the work of the Graphic Information Research Unit at the Royal College of Art, remembered in an article by Linda Reynolds, its chief researcher. Silver ink is used as a third colour on the cover, to reproduce the letter-stencil that is the subject of Eric Kindel’s article. The issue leads with a path-breaking article on ‘The young Garamont’ by Hendrik Vervliet, and includes also spirited pieces by Giovanni Lussu and the late Justin Howes. Copies of Typography papers 7 should reach our London warehouse in early August, and can then be bought (as usual) through good bookshops and direct from Central Books. It will be released in North America in the early autumn, when copies arrive at our distributor’s warehouse there.

This week we received copies of Christopher Burke’s new book. It has been well printed by Die Keure in Bruges and well bound (with cold glue!) by Van Waarden in Zaandam. Perhaps it’s one of the very few (fingers of one hand?) books about Tschichold whose design & production values might bear comparison with the books that he himself brought into the world. This is to say only that it’s a work of ordinary industrial production that uses sympathetic materials, and whose design is in the European mainstream that Tschichold so largely helped to define. The official date of release in Europe is 2 August. Copies should reach our North American distributor in September or so.