Besides my practical experience, my background inlcudes a whole lotta history and art and somehow I do seem to keep ending up back at the Italian Renaissance. On a whim on Sunday, I started reading a chapter in Philip Meggs’s History of Graphic Design, which Matt had left out as a casual suggestion that I might like to scope out some design reference materials before jumping in the deep end of book and print design. I’m not sure he could have been any more right on.

I happened to crack the book open about a quarter of the way through, which just happens to be the chapter on the origins of modern book design: the Italian Renaissance. With the classical focus and sheer level of information circulating at that point in time, it makes sense that modern design elements thrived then. That’s a period of time I’ve studied in depth, with regard to its art and social history, but somehow I never got to the book side of all that history.

I’ve taken enough history to know that we learn from what precedes us and I’ve read enough to know that printers’ roles in disseminating information were at phenomenal heights during the Renaissance but, let’s be honest, I never made the leap to understand the parallels between that sort of information collection and dispersal and the sort my other half and I try to do in our spare time in on a daily basis.

We’re in the early stages of designing a book of my dad’s stories, which I will print and bind in a small edition this year. As I looked at the figures of beautiful Italian books and page spreads (even moreso for their entirely handcrafted precision), it struck me how ingrained all of these designers’ ideas and work are in everything printed today. Their margins, ornaments, spacing, and organizational principles permeate everything printed, from invitations to ads, posters, and books. The cadre of Italian printers who set the standards for modern text design principles are the names we see every day when choosing the font in which to express our ideas, or how to stretch a paper to the required page length at the last minute: Garamond, Palatino, Jenson.

As I now approach my own first book printing, I’m unanticipatedly satisfied that the process brings with it such a sense of history, tradition, and the ability to contribute something new, lasting, and (hopefully!) beautiful to the world. I’m sensitive to the details; the fonts Matt is choosing to lay out my dad’s words in, and how the text will align and interact with the illustrations my mom is creating.

The idea is that, once I’ve printed the book, the binding will also work in tandem with the style of the printing, design, and illustrations. In The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst insists a printer and designer know the content of their material intimately before making significant decisions about fonts, spacing, and overall design. My dad’s stories are tender, insightful, and beautiful. They are straightforward narratives and lyrical metaphors we’ve enjoyed for years. That Matt and I have the ability to take these stories from our memories to people’s hands is an exciting process, no question, and one we’re looking forward to doing many times over in the future.