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.

The essay ‘Fellow readers’ was included in the book Unjustified texts, reprinted last year and still selling briskly. There the cover of the original publication, with its statement-in-place-of-a-blurb, has been lost from view – which is a reason for resurrecting it here. (Keen typographers may see that the author hadn’t yet grasped how to set justification values in QuarkXPress – in the pamphlet text too.)

Robin Kinross