The wide variety of available typesfaces help the designer to choose a suitable font for anything from newsletters to flyers and right up to newspapers or professional designs for competitions and advertisements. Each font has a particular history and feel to it. It helps to know this history as you look for a font for the particular job at hand. You would never choose the courier font for a art deco job. The first step in knowing how to choose an appropriate font is to know a bit about the fonts available and their history.
Some modern fonts have no particular history, but most have one or more influences or purposes.
This book motivates this by showing several examples of appropriate and inappropriate usage, and explains why each is right or wrong. Then it moves on to explaining the terms necessary to understand fonts and their lingo, as well as the basic font formats and platforms. This treatment moves to the individual characters and the various parts of a letter. From here the history of fonts is traced through a series of very thorough chapters, outlining the typefaces in chronological order. Starting with old style, we move through transitional to modern, and beyond.