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Ask HN: What is the most beautifully typeset book you've ever encountered?

by luizfelberti on 3/24/21, 3:58 PM with 8 comments

Recently I've been reading a lot of Tufte's work [0], and also some of Richard E. Mayer's stuff [1], as well as browsing through some older physical books, and started to get a feeling that the old stuff is of far superior quality, and that our tools for web publishing don't come even close.

I'm now looking to source some inspiration from the wisdom of the HN crowd, so: what are some examples of superb typography and typesetting you've seen in print?

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[0] https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000ld

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-multimedia-learning/09E09224829AB8D3D327EF8A0E9B5288

by victop on 3/25/21, 7:41 PM
This question [0] in the TeX Stack Exchange has beautiful typesetted examples, like this LaTeX facsimile of (one page of) a Bible de Genève of 1564 [1], and Byrne's Elements of Euclyd from 1847 [2]
[0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/1319/777
[1] https://github.com/raphink/geneve_1564/releases/download/201...
[2] https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid/releases/downloa...
by helph67 on 3/24/21, 9:52 PM
You have specified `typeset' so this doesn't apply but you may be interested in the `Book Of Kells"... https://www.claddaghdesign.com/history/irish-treasures-the-b...
by enhdless on 3/25/21, 5:14 AM
You should look into artist books too! One of my favorites is the Diderot Project, which I got to see when I took a class on letterpress printing and the history of book arts. It's based on the Diderot encyclopedia from the 1700s.
http://www.kenbotnick.com/diderot
by mtmail on 3/24/21, 4:10 PM
Saw somebody commenting on the quality of https://press.stripe.com/ books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532543 I don't own one myself.
by vulkd on 3/25/21, 12:11 AM
House of Leaves goes through a few interesting concepts that seem to divide people (mirrored type, point size changes dependent upon how loud a sound is etc).
by Jugurtha on 3/25/21, 12:04 AM
Not the "most beautifully typeset", but Augustin Louis Cauchy's "Cours d'Analyse de l'École Royale Polytechnique" in 1821 looks to have been done with TeX.
https://archive.org/details/coursdanalysede00caucgoog/page/n...
At the end of the introduction, he thanked a few people for their guidance. That's the who's who of mathematics and physics: Poisson, Ampère, and Coriolis.