Ebook: An Essay on Typography (1936)

Gill wrote, referring to the earlier issue, ‘It was one of the author’s chief objects to describe two worlds - that of industrialism and that of the human workman - & to define their limits’. It is with the application of his ‘two worlds’ theory to the trade of printing that the first chapter is especially con­cerned. ‘On the one hand is the world of mechan­ized industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life - provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings’, and ‘On the other... a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompa­nies it. ’ Gill, himself, in the same 1936 introduction considered that these ‘chief objects’ had been ‘imperfectly remembered’ and faulted the book on that account, although the theme recurs frequently in succeeding chapters.