Inasmuch as it was written in 1948, “Printing Design and Layout” by Vincent Steer could never be one of those ‘typography’ books that explain everything in terms of dialog boxes for a particular program, and I like that. There’s a wealth of detail (only some of which is dated), and I don’t know if it’s indicative of the author or the time and place where it was written, but the text also has a wonderful tone that I like.
For example, since Dave Cramer, author of the “Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination” document from the “Latinreq” task force of the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group, was most recently working on initial capitals, that was one of the sections of “Printing Design and Layout” that I looked at when I got my copy last Friday, where I found this gem: