In Quest of the Perfect Book: Reminiscences & Reflections of a Bookman
1926
A bookman's love letter to the printed word, and the nearest thing to sacred text any typographer will ever read. William Dana Orcutt spent a lifetime in the trenches of early 20th-century book production, and in these reminiscences he distills decades of obsession with paper, ink, typefaces, and the almost spiritual marriage between content and container. The book opens with a friend who has acquired a rare volume without understanding its artistic significance - a sin Orcutt treats with gentle horror - and spirals outward into meditations on printing as an art form, the great typographers and binders he knew, and the impossible, essential quest to create a book so harmonious that reader and page become one. This is not a how-to guide. It is a memoir of devotion, full of specific encounters, named masters, and the quiet thrill of tracing a perfect letterform across a perfect page. For anyone who has ever run a thumb along a book's spine and felt something like reverence.
