Meggs' history of graphic design: Reviewed

For the last couple of months I've been reading

Meggs' history of graphic design (fifth edition). Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis. 2012 revised (1998 original).

This is a 600-page book, with several thousand individually captioned images (I ran out of library renewals and had to rush, so didn't end up getting many pictures of them). Imagine a heavy encyclopedia crammed full of all kinds of visual design from history.

Structure 

There are so many overlapping movements, eras, styles, schools, and flourishings of (what would come to be called) graphic design. Meggs & Purvis choose to divide history into chunks, and their book into corresponding parts. Each part has a few chapters, each separately covering concurrent developments in different movements or countries.

Each section opens with a summary of the chapters it contains, in the form of a timeline. Useful for a reference book, although I only glanced at them in reading this book cover to cover.

 

Production quality

Let's get a few issues out of the way first because there's a lot of good to say about Meggs' history! This was the longest and densest book I've read in a long time. It is expertly written and edited. The rate of textual errors per word is hundreds of times better than in some books I've read recently. I saw just thirty typos over the course of the entire work.

(Page 12, a full stop for a comma creates sentence fragments. Page 135, accidental line break. Page 136, 'either' in the wrong spot. Pages 224, 398, 482, and 553, "wich" for "which". Page 271, "has been" for "have been". Page 287, 'Figs' for 'Fig'. Page 290, unclosed parentheses. Page 350, redundant "also". Page 357, accidental sentence break. Page 389, "COBAL" for "COBOL". Page 417, "if" for "of". Page 479, "te" for "the". Pages 538 and 539, "florescent" for "fluorescent". Page 554, repeats the figure from the epilogue. Page 556, misapplied boldface.)

Curiously, 13 of these 30 errors occur in Chapter 23 specifically, giving the impression that the whole chapter missed the copyediting step:

Page 485, calls Japan "an island". Page 489, figure 23-16 is captioned as 22-16. Page 506, figures 23-77, -78, and -79 are called 24-77, -78, and -79. Page 508, "potography" for "photography". Pages 513 and 517, missing subheadings. Page 517, figures 23-113 and 23-114 are called 24-113 and 24-114. Page 521, misplaced comma. Page 529, "than that" for "to that".

I took issue with the block quotes, which are indented very similarly to the paragraph indent, use the same font, have no extra vertical space, and indent the following paragraph normally. Altogether this makes them hard to distinguish from the text. Fortunately the book only uses block quotes a few times.

Meggs' history usually prefers its figures to appear after they are discussed in the text. I dislike this because you can't properly understand text that is discussing an image you haven't seen yet.

Sometimes the figures appear in a different order to their textual references, e.g., 5-10 through 5-15, so it's puzzling that some full-page examples weren't just moved and renumbered to appear on the facing page to the textual reference.

I know from experience that laying out figures is extremely difficult. I wouldn't have mentioned the ordering, but it's made so much more of a hassle by the fact that...

The book has broken gutters!

One severe shortcoming made Meggs' history really hard to read.

At 600 pages, the hardback is so thick and heavy that when you open it on a table (unless you open it at the middle) the lighter side is lifted into the air. This makes ~30 mm of the page curve into the inner margin or "gutter". But the text columns continue to a margin of ~10 mm!

This is a huge obstacle to comfortable reading. On every line, at least one word disappears entirely into the gutter, and a couple more are distorted! It's even worse at the start and end of the book, where the curve of the pages is so pronounced that they obscure part of the opposite page!

I had to read this enormous book with two workarounds:

• I can hold the thicker side of the book up vertically, putting my head down sideways to read those pages then sitting up to read pages on the lighter side normally.
• I can press down really hard on a page on the lighter side while trying to read it (the book is so heavy that this requires both hands or the full weight of my arm).

This is completely stupid to begin with, and then the text constantly asks you to refer to a figure on a different page!

This issue affects all but the middle ~150 pages, i.e., this book cannot be read by opening it flat in front of you. The first note I made for this review called this a 'hassle'; now that I'm writing it up I'll upgrade that to 'accessibility nightmare'. It's frankly unacceptable and I can't understand how it happened.

Chock-full of content

Part of the allure of books like this are the graphic design examples. You could delight in it as a picture book, completely devoid of context. For example, there are some striking pieces by A. M. Cassandre (you can see more of his work catalogued here: https://www.moma.org/artists/1015-a-m-cassandre#works):

But of course the book is meant to be about the historical discussion, which is very engaging (sometimes enrapturing) and comprehensive. The history of paper and printing in the first few chapters helped tie together a lot of areas in which I had vaguely known a handful of facts. Meggs' history traces the development of the written word from antiquity of Christian manuscripts, the throughline of Chinese printing to the Italian Renaissance, Celtic influences on Charlemagne's manuscript reforms (through English scholar Alcuin of York), and so on.

Here's an eye-opening fact. As of 1450, there were an estimated 50,000 volumes in European monasteries and libraries in total. In the next 50 years, with the advent of printing, nine million more books (35,000 editions alone) would be created. And that doesn't include printed ephemera (tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides), of which there were a lot. That's what a difference even early printing made in cost and production speed.

Meggs & Purvis give a concise explanation of the Industrial Revolution, discussing how it indirectly led to an explosion of typography and invention of 3D, decorated, and reversed fonts by typefounders in the early 1800s. The return to wood type for large display-sized printing (which metal was ill-suited to) was enabled by the invention of a new router in 1827 for producing the type. 

A few interesting specifics:

• Some very familiar names popping up in discussing the people behind the typefaces: Bodoni, Baskerville, Playfair, Garamond, Caslon, Goudy...
• I felt a certain kindred spirit in the authors' dissatisfaction with the numerous mistakes in the Book of Kells (~800 CE) juxtaposed to the "visual delight" of its "noble design" and "beautiful, carefully lettered half-uncials" (page 50).
• The word "stereotype" originally comes from a printing plate production technique.
• The first sans-serif font was by William Caslon IV, 1816, and called "two lines English Egyptian". These typefaces started spreading a decade later – but what to call them? Caslon used 'Doric' (presumably because a Doric column lacks the base and flourishes of an Ionic or Corinthian). Thorowgood said 'grotesque'. Blake and Stephenson, 'sans-surryphs'. The Boston Type and Stereotype Foundry, 'Gothics'. Vincent Figgins used 'sans serif' in 1832 and it stuck.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on the Art Nouveau movement and its various consequences for the West. I hadn't known about its roots in the ukiyo-e tradition ("pictures of the floating world") of Japan's Tokugawa period.

Art Nouveau disappeared in the ashes of WWI. Those numerous chapters on the early to mid 1900s were grim reading at times, even as all the different art and design movements of the era blossomed.

But history will remember Lucian Bernhard's adorable trademark and poster made for Hommel Micrometers (1912):

Also I don't care for the futurists, but check out this iconic book bound not with thread but enormous bolts. Fortunato Depero's Depero futurista, 1927:

Tricky history

I was a little bit concerned by some mild whitewashing of history, or at least oversimplification of the kind that feels like a repackaging of high school history. It shows up regarding Charlemagne and the 'feudal system', and the intersection of Christianity with the Celts, areas where I've read a little bit from modern historians; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot more I didn't notice.

Also, Cadmus of Miletus may have brought the Phoenician alphabet to Greece, and possibly also killed a dragon then planted its teeth to grow an army, sure. The authors' hypothesis that "the power of Cadmus to raise armies from nowhere could have been due to his command of the alphabet" as "[t]roop movements, scouting reports, and orders from the field could be delivered by writing" (page 25) seems completely speculative for this quasi-historical figure.

There's a weird moment on page 434 where Meggs says "the memory of" a historic atrocity "was redeemed by the modern graphic design, architecture, and of course the fraternity of sports presented in the Olympic Games in Beijing". I hope this line is some kind of bizarre typo or fumbling for a word other than 'redeemed' because yeesh.

These are just the flies in the 600-page ointment, of course. Over all, the whole book appears to be extremely well-researched.

Modernity

I'm just barely old enough that I briefly had my hands on an electric typewriter when I was a kid, courtesy of my grandmother, although even then it was really only a curiosity. So I was tickled to see this: 

Hanging punctuation (and hanging T crossbar) in an old IBM advertisement. The letters are tightly-tracked; is that an underscore or a really tightly-tracked ellipsis?

Meggs' history has some neat examples of electronically created collages from the 1980s as the predecessors of the digital graphic design revolution.

Chapter 22 covers postmodernism and the retro. It was neat, in a slightly recursive way, to dissect how designers started deeply examining the history of their art and calling back to famous bits of graphic design. I was tickled to see the book reproduce some of their works and then casually instruct the reader to turn back hundred of pages to see the sources they were inspired by. For some reason this feels fun even in a world of hypertext.

The fifth edition of the book adds a few chapters to take us all the way up to the early 2000s. By this stage I was burning the midnight oil to finish it, so I have few notes, but I enjoyed seeing the transition into the digital world, and a new explosion of graphic design possibilities and affordances on par with either Gutenberg or the Industrial Revolution. 

(Also shout out in passing to Exocet, the instantly-recognisable Diablo font.)

In summary 

I can't easily compare this to the other books on graphic design that I've read in 2026. Most of those have been modern and highly accessible instructional texts, not reference books. I will say, though, that it's refreshing to read a design book without constant textual mistakes.

Compared to the books on specific 20th Century areas of design, Meggs' history is obviously less able to get into all the fine details for a particular creator or movement so systematically, trading breadth for depth. But it still goes into detail for particular case studies, and is very professionally produced.

Meggs' history delivers stellar content but is a damn trial to deal with as a physical object. If I ever come into money, I will buy a copy of this book and have it cut up and expertly rebound in multiple volumes.

Twentieth Century art and design: Three book reviews

Let's take a trip back in time. 

This year on the blog I've been reviewing books about graphic design (here, here) and books of graphic design (here). Today I have a few more in that category, exploring the graphic design of the twentieth century.

Read on for 'art through precision' by M. C. Escher, vintage typography reclaimed, and a hundred years of science fiction illustrations.

Book 1

 

The graphic work of M C Escher. 1975. Maurits Escher. Translator John E. Brigham.

I was interested in M. C. Escher's work as a child, but haven't thought much about it (beyond one Escher print on my wall) between then and reading this book now. This is a reprint of his 1961 book.

Escher selected and arranged the contents, and wrote the book's introduction (the entirety of its text). In translation, Escher sounds like an old-timey wizard. This isn't helped by him name-dropping his dark arts:

 

Extract from book. "This was in 1946 when I first made the acquaintance of the old and highly respectable black art technique of the mezzotint".

(Copy Editor Brain never turns off; even in five scant pages of text I noticed the weird paragraph breaks, 'lightening' for 'lightning', etc.)

A remarkable commentary 

I want to start with Escher's own explanation of this book.

"Apart from prints 1 to 7 inclusive, all the numbered reproductions in this book were made with a view to communicating a specific line of thought. The ideas that are basic to them often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us."

Escher makes it very clear that his artworks are deliberate visual expressions of specific ideas (these come across as mathematical ideas to the modern viewer/reader, but he shies away from the word). He takes pains to describe how and why each piece develops the idea. So when, for example, he talks about infinity, it's not in a vacuous or emotive way, but in very specific and grounded terms, of nadir and horizon and reduction and proportion and geometry and limits. I've actually never seen art explained so clearly before, and I found it very endearing.

The process of artistry

Escher says he finds as a mature artist that an artwork comes about in two phases. First there is a lengthy, difficult visualisation and numerous attempts to get a detailed concept sketch right. "After this, to my great relief, there dawns the second phase, that is the making of the graphic print; for now the spirit can take its rest while the work is taken over by the hands."

Manual skill has been sublimated and the toughest work that remains is deciding on its application. 

It's slightly melancholy to read Escher casually mentioning the secrets of what might as well be lost arts for most people – specifics of woodcut printing, hand-etching mezzoprints, etc – in a way he clearly expects his reader will be familiar with.

 

 

So yes this book is absolutely fascinating, for reading as much as viewing.

The commentary also achieved its goal, in helping me understand some Escher works I've seen before but not comprehended (or perhaps only appreciated the artistry without realising there was something to comprehend). For example:

This print explores the use of 2D artworks to denote 3D objects and the fact that there's no true way to experience 2D in our 3D world. Escher depicts three shapes. The first is a sphere. It rests atop the second, a reinterpretation as a 2D form giving the illusion of a sphere, made paper-thin and folded in half to reveal the deception. One of its edges rests (as if it really were the lower half of a sphere) atop the third, another reinterpretation as a 2D image shown in perspective resting on a flat surface.

In summary

A really enjoyable book. I got far more out of it than I expected to.

Also there's a vein of TTRPG inspirations here, e.g.:

 

When Escher's work enters the public domain in ~2043, it's going to be a huge boon to indie RPG and art zine scenes.

 

Book 2

 

 

Vintage typography & signage. 2018. Frank H. Atkinson, Charles J. Strong, & L. S. Strong.

I've used these reviews to vent about textual errors before. Finally, an exception: this book is completely without typo. How does it accomplish this? It has only a single paragraph of text.

The remaining 120 pages are all dedicated to recreations of various signs, illustrations, and typefaces from the early 1900s.

The original sources are two books, Frank H. Atkinson's Sign Painting (1900) and Strong's Book of Designs (1917). I don't understand why this information isn't given up front in the aforementioned single paragraph of text. The book just says "two rare, early-twentieth-century sources" and relegates the titles to the tiny legal text in the front matter. It feels faintly distasteful. On the other hand, only the three twentieth-century artists are credited (L. S. [Lawrence Stuart] Strong is Charles Strong's son; their Book of Designs is a collaboration).

Most of the examples are in black and white, with a few decorative initials and full page illustrations rendered in colour. Stylistically, the examples are all either 19th-century traditional signwriting or distinctly Art Nouveau.

It was pretty easy to chase down the source texts for comparison: Sign Painting and Strong's Book of Designs are both archived.

In summary

I wonder what the process of cleaning up the originals for republication was like. On the one hand, they certainly appear to be in a smooth modern format. Are they vectorised, manually or with an automatic tool? Or is the publisher having access to the original printing plates sufficient to produce nice crisp copies that you can't get from archives of old original print copies?

I find it notable that no additional artist or author involved in publishing this modern edition is credited. I'd hesitate to call it a cash grab, but this isn't a high-effort book. It's a good resource for works from the specific era. Some of the examples were interesting enough that I've downloaded copies of the original sources from archive.org for inspiration or use.

Book 3

 

100 years of science fiction illustration. 1975. Anthony Frewin.

The photo above is my battered old copy of this book, often flicked through but never read cover-to-cover. It covers the 1840-1940 period. The writing is quite editorial in tone, with a Britishness that occasionally comes through when cross-examining twentieth century American writings about the state of the art in science fiction.

 

Amazing Stories

 

Tracing the origination of science fiction

There's no hard line to be drawn at the start of the SF era, and author Anthony Frewin's choice to begin with the work of Grandville in the 1840s is in a sense arbitrary, especially since the book follows it with a 40-year gap before including the works of Robida.

When tracing the genre's roots and trying to establish when it really became an entire new category, Frewin credits John W. Campbell as having "moulded" all of SF to come. Magazine editor Hugo Gernsback takes some knocks in the process:

"Gernsback (1884-1967) may not have been the 'Father of Science Fiction' as so often has been claimed, but that he made a substantial contribution to the development of the genre no one could deny. To say that he gave SF an almost universal popularity at the cost of castrating its literacy is not far from the truth."

Frewin calls Gernsback's prose "bereft of sensitivity, devoid of humour, pedestrian in the extreme, and evincing enthusiasm for nothing more than the most abject of gadgets".

From the sample included I have to agree Gernsback's writing was unimpressive. It also taught me that in the 1920s we almost settled on the term "scientifiction" instead of "science fiction":

 

Regarding science fiction artistry specifically, Frewin notes that the work of Frank R. Paul as a magazine cover artist would come to characterise all SF work for "forty years" [1927-1946].

Trends, critiques, and content

Frewin traces the rise of science fiction chronologically, era by era and artist by artist, with an understandable focus on the magazine industry where most of it was happening. He generally doesn't withhold criticism – "The turtle-men are ill-executed and of little consequence" is a great line, doubly so out of context.

He has a number of other bangers, such as referring to 1938 as the year SF technology stops looking like "the inside of a radio set". And on changes in SF and publishing trends: "Today's format is tomorrow's doormat".

For my purposes though, the text was a bit judgey without always having strong explanatory power; I would have preferred more focus on why Frewin thinks some work or other is "insipid". 

100 years of science fiction illustration was published in 1975, of course. The editorial tone could have been a lot worse. Instead, Frewin comports himself well, calling out xenophobia, the depredations of war, and narrowness of writers' assumptions.

The book reproduces tons of neat images. There's lot of technical proficiency on display, all with that instantly recognisable twentieth century science fiction feel.

Errors

100 years of science fiction illustration feels a little amateurish in production, perhaps appropriately given so much of its subject matter is about grasping blindly at new concepts. The book layout is odd. The paragraphs have neither indents nor spaces, making it hard to tell where they start. Many paragraphs end in ellipses, for all that the text lightly mocks this practise several times.

The choice of a typeface with fine lines means that when printed white-on-black, commas turn into full stops. For example:

And there are lots of outright mistakes in the copy. Entire repeated lines. Misspellings, often consistent ("canon" and "apocolyptic" throughout). Missing spaces. An arbitrary mixture of italics and quotes for titles, and at least one mis-titled story.

In summary

 

This book delivers just what you would expect from the premise. I'm not at all well-versed in science fiction history, so it's possible it has omissions, but the text felt comprehensive and thoughtful and the illustrations were very engaging.

 

Relevance to my 'learn about graphic design' goals

I'm enjoying expanding my art analysis palette. It's good to take a closer, deeper, and more systematic look at types of artwork that feel familiar but only from having seen instances in passing.

Tune in next time for a study in highs and lows when I look at Graphic Design for Dummies!