Robert Bringhurst’s classic The Elements of Typographic Style (4th ed., 2012) has just appeared in French translation. His other books include A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World. His latest publication is a volume of poems, The Ridge (2023).
“Books,” writes Robert Bringhurst, “are things that humans make, or try to make, as persistently as birds make nests, and we do it for similar reasons.” In the following essay, the author mulls the fu…