Until now we have had a policy of not charging UK customers for the carriage of books and CDs bought from this website. But, on Monday, the Royal Mail is raising its charges markedly. Postage costs will represent an even larger proportion of a purchase – and we have decided now to introduce charges to cover our costs.

This is the cover of the pamphlet Fellow readers: notes on multiplied language, which Hyphen Press put out in 1994. The piece was prompted by the debates over typography that had been published in the pages of Emigre and Eye magazines, and elsewhere. A participant in this discussion, I saw the chance to make a more extended contribution when my book Modern typography was coming up for a reprint. This was in 1994, just as the wind was beginning to go out of this little Anglo-American storm. I gave the publication the format of Modern typography (in its first edition of 1992), using the same typeface, and page construction, and wrote to fill 32 pages – which would be just enough to give it a spine with the author and title on it. The margins carried quite a few notes: I was conscious that Modern typography’s margins had been underused. I imagined that the printers might make the book and the pamphlet in the same production process, which they almost did. Fellow readers seemed to serve its purpose. Though slender, as a free-standing publication it made more of a mark than any magazine article could.

Postings in this journal column have been light over the last few months. This is partly just because we’ve been busy. But it is partly due to having opened a Twitter account (@hyphenpress). We don’t put out much there either, but the fascination of Twitter has certainly taken up energy that might have been put into this column. Ideally one should tweet there and post here, and there are some remorseless bloggers who only tweet to announce their new blog posts. The more interesting course seems to be to use Twitter for light, quick messages with real content, and these blog or journal postings for more extended and longer, more lasting things. That’s what we will try for.