Book excerpt: This highly visual introduction to all things typographic unravels the story of the fonts that we encounter every day. It opens with an A-Z of a range of significant fonts, chosen to represent the typographic spectrum. As well as looking at each font's historical context and design ethos, a pangram will showcase the entire alphabetic range of each font, as well as relaying a pithy message about the font's history, purpose or use.A chapter on Anatomy will deconstruct the letters of the English alphabet to reveal the anatomical structure of the letterforms, explaining terms such as bowl, crossbar, finial, ligature and spur. An examination of the typographer's toolkit explains how type can be manipulated and arranged on the page to create an arresting design. The final chapter examines the myriad signs, symbols and punctuation marks that litter the printed page, created to endow printed text with additional meaning and nuance.