type

Type Idea Index: The Designer's Ultimate Tool for Choosing and Using Fonts Creatively
$24.99
good for inspiration. Book provides typeface names. Also suggests combinations and personalities. Great place to start looking when stumped.

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1
$59.99
Jan Tholenaar got for many years in the ban of the beuatiful typespecimenbooks particularely of the 19th century. He collected an unbelievable number of these books and know you can believe it after having seen a view in a number of items of his collection. I had the pleasure to meet him when he was in the middle of the creation of the visual history of typefaces and he enthousastically explained me how typesetters sometimes worked more than a month on one page! Recomended to everybody that loves old typography.

Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design
$25.00
This is one of the prettiest books I own. It was also the most helpful book I purchased on typography and design. The examples and the book itself are gorgeous and the text explanations are thorough and easy to understand. Reading this book felt like taking an intro to typography course. This is as good as I could have expected it to be.

1,000 Type Treatments: From Script to Serif, Letterforms Used to Perfection
$19.99
I'm not sure what my expectations were when I ordered this book however after seeing a number of examples within I had to ask myself, "Do people really read the copy (or even some of it) from half these designs?"

There are some good examples but I find most are impractical to everyday design. I find it hard to believe that stamping a half dozen fonts on top of each other is good communication "design" unless maybe it isn't meant to be read.

This is a first glance thumbing through of the book and subjective, probably based on personal preference. I see a number of readers liked this book quite well.