121. Your P's and Q's.

A colleague of mine introduced me to this great resource - a 1923 edition of P's and Q's - A Book on the Art of Letter Arrangement, by Sallie B. Tannahill. (A former teacher of lettering at Columbia University and a friend of Vojtech Preissig – the Czech typographer and book designer – whose work gets sampled frequently throughout the book.)

The goal of P's and Q's is to show the infinite variation and approach to letter design through an artistic lens via examples. In the introduction Tannahill states, "Well-selected letters, drawn with force and quality, arranged in good proportion, tone and color, and grouped . . . may be as fine and as complete as (any) design." My version of the book is badly in need of repair (notice the 'discard' stamp on the inside cover,) but I still posted scans of the entire Part I (chapters 1-4) on flickr, here. If there is enough demand, I'll post the other Parts. I hope you enjoy this resource as much as I have.

Update on Sep 26, 2007 at 01:29PM by jj

Thanks for all the feedback. I'll post the rest of this beauty in the next few days. In the meantime, check out Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour on XM today - it repeasts all day today. It's a great pick-me-up, even if you're not a huge Dylan fan. So good.

Comments

[HornCologne]

Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful resource! It comes from a period I have always loved stylistically. Since it is currently unavailable ... could you pleasepleaseplease share the rest of it with us? Would be v. nice.

Thanks again,

HC

[Menor]

Thanks, I really like this kind of old knowledge, plus the book it's beautiful, add my vote to posting the other parts

[Mark]

Awesome! would love to see the rest..

[CapnMarrrrk]

Wow, this is really neat. I've bookmarked it for later and deep perusal. I'd love to see the other chapters, but not at the expense of the book.

[evilelka]

please keep scanning! i love this book!

[Andrew]

Please, please, please! How could anyone resist seeing all of this book?

[Brian]

Any way you could release these scans (hi-res) as a PDF for download?

[Faz Choudhury]

Thank you, what great book, please scan more if you can.

[Tim]

This is so cool! I'd love to be able to download a PDF of it or something.

[jj]

Wow - thanks for all the kind words.

I think making an e-book/pdf out of it makes a great deal of sense. I'll definitely keep scanning and will take a look at doing that.

Again, thanks for all the comments.

[Vince]

What HornCologne said...

[glebis]

Please keep posting the scans, it's a great source of inspiration! Thank you for your job!

[Nabit]

I'm completely mesmerized by this book. So much so that I hunted down and ordered a copy ;) Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

And by all means, do scan the rest of the book. A PDF would be great, or a single archive containing all the hi-res scans.

[SvonHalenbach]

Since this book is this old, you could upload the scans of all sides to wikisource. Then it is in the public for all times and maybe will be translated into other languages.

[Claudia]

3 years later, your flickr is now "private". So sad. It seems to be the only version of P's and Q's on the web.

[jj]

Claudia - I'll see what I can do to fix that. Thanks for the notice. :)

[Sunil Ranjhan]

i HAVE A ORIGINAL COPY OF ITS 1943 EDITION WITH ME. aNYONE INTERSTED IN BUYING IT ? Contact me at [email protected]