A good typographer does what he should do, not what he wants to do. While there are certainly many solutions to the problem of designing any one book, the better solutions—the solutions that are best for the reader—are often the simplest, or, appear to be the simplest. Ironically, the careful and thoughtful work of the designer should hardly appear at all to the casual reader lest he be distracted from the content at hand. The temptation to use typographic trickery can be overwhelming, but the careful typographer must determine what is truly required to best communicate the specific and coherent ideas of the author or artist. Only when these ideas are conveyed—no matter how delicious the paper or precious the binding—can a book be beautiful. However, while we're trying to convey those aforementioned ideas, why not letterspace the small caps and insert oldstyle figures and leave some room for your thumbs in the margins? That's what we do—even if you don't want to pay for it. We just can't help ourselves.

Many of the books on the following pages are huge, and it's absurd to try to see all of our work reduced to a few hundred pixels. (Just what is a 'pixel' anyway?) You might consider requesting (or downloading) a printed copy of Some Fifteen Books Carefully Designed, our modest printed survey of books we've designed over the last few years. We're also put together a more comprehensive digital showing, A Further Showing of Carefully Designed Books, which will allow you to zoom in and out on the designs of many of the books on the following Web pages.

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