I read Glenn Fleishman's writing on the internet for years before reading this book. His book about How Comics Are Made is probably more popular and appropriate for a more general audience, but this one is closer to my heart: the Elements of Typographic Style left a deep impression on me, and I grew up pretty close to the publishing industry. My dad's huge photo printers, scanners, and film developing equipment were always there as curiosities in my childhood.
I love how this book is published, on a self-hosted website, with reasonable shipping costs and a human touch. It's of the same type as the Derek Sivers book store, Robin Sloan's shop, or Radiohead's intentionally independent distribution. And the book itself is beautiful, with cloth binding, foil, thick pages, and really nice illustrations.
It's for real fans of typesetting. This is not a general-interest fun book of stories, it is a real dive into the specifics of how the people used the machines, what the machines did, and how printing came to be. At times it was too much for even me - I kept pulling up Wikipedia pages for the printing techniques being discussed to get an overview and a few more pictures. The illustrations are amazing, in really nice historical style, but I wish there were more of them.
I love that it's as much about the people as the machines. It covers how all the technological advances changed the job market and the job. Printing used to be a really dangerous job and a really physical one. People operating the machines could get splashed with molten lead. At one stage, the letters were inked using wool-stuffed leather balls that were soaked every night in urine to keep them supple. I wish I had known about the Tiny Type Museum in time to buy one, and to own some examples of what he's talking about.
I love its discussion of the terminology. Linotype is actually just "line of type." Lots of printing terminology is based on biblical heaven-and-hell references. It had never clicked to me that the litho in lithography is for the stone used in the process. It's cool how so much of the terminology lives on in modern processes.
In Fleishman's own words, this book is "exhaustive but brief." That seems about right for the way I read it, cover to cover and in the span of a few days. Despite being less than 70 pages, it is not a quick read, even compared to Bringhurst's writing on typography.
But I love it anyway, and it's the kind of book I want to keep around and crack open once in a while to revisit this truly interesting vein of invention.