This book could practically be the textbook for a Typography class. It’s great that Massimo Vignelli is giving it away free on his website. The book is seperated into a theory section and a more concrete “rules” section. I appreciate Vignelli’s thoughts on the minimal use of typefaces, he states, “Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.” There is also some great material addressing the use of grids in the layout process.

Studies in Pen Art is a pamphlet published by William E. Dennis in 1914. It contains some very cool calligraphc styles as well as some inspiring lettering styles. Thankfully, it has been scanned and compiled as a PDF which you can download here.

Via.