Books & References

Students and Designers often complain about the lack of resources available to them to carry out their Devanagari typography projects. We have consolidated a list of resources which will probably fulfill most of the requirements of most projects. The list is categorised into 5 sections: Devanagari Typography / Lettering / Calligraphy, History of Scripts / Typography / Books / Manuscripts, Historiography / Book History / Type+Culture / Text+Culture / Post-Colonial Studies, Latin Type Design + Typography Books and Other Books / Technical Papers. This list is by no means exhaustive and it is likely you might have to refer to resources which are not listed, we hope to keep updating this list from time to time.

Devanagari Typography / Lettering / Calligraphy

History of Scripts / Typography / Books / Manuscripts

• American Marathi Mission. Memorial papers of the American Marathi Mission, 1813-1881. Mumbai: Education Society Press, 1882.
• Bühler, Georg. Indian Paleography. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2004.
• Goswamy, B. N. The Word Is Sacred, Sacred Is the Word: The Indian Manuscript Tradition. Niyogi Books, 2007.
• Kesavan, Bellary Shamanna, and P.N. Venkatachari, History of printing and publishing in India. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1984.
• Kulkarni, Jayant Balakrishna. डॉ. भिसे व्यक्ती आणि कार्य (Dr. Bhise: Vyakti ani Karya). Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 1939.
• Kulkarni, Purshottam Balkrishna. निर्ण्यसागरची अक्षर साधना शेठ जावजी दादाजी ह्यांचे चरित्र, Alphabetical Exercitations of NirnaySagar, A Biography of Seth Jawaji Dadaji. Nirnaya Sagar Press, Mumbai, 1967.
• Marshman, Joshua Clark. Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission. Longman, London, 1859.
• Naik, Bapurao S. Early Printing in Indian Scripts. CALTIS 83: pp 13-15, 1983.
• Ojha, Gaurishankar Hirachand. The Palaeography of India. 3rd., Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., Delhi, 1971.
• Priolkar, Anant Kakba. The Printing Press in India: Its Beginnings and Early Development. Marathi Samshodhana Mandala, Mumbai, 1958.
• Ross, Fiona G. E. The printed Bengali character and its evolution. Curzon Press, Surrey, 1999
• Ross, Fiona G. E. Non-Latin scripts: from metal to digital type. St Bride Foundation, London, 2012
• Salomon, Richard. Indian Epigraphy:A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit and other Indo-Aryan Languages. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., Delhi, 1998.
• Shaw, Graham. “South Asia.” In A companion to the history of the book. edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 126–137. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
• Shaw, Graham. “The History of Printing in South Asia.” In Global trends in library and information science, by Subhas Chandra Biswas. Gyan Books, New Delhi, 1995.
• Shaw, Graham. Printing in Calcutta to 1800: A description and checklist of printing in late 18th-century Calcutta. Bibliographical Society, London, 1981.
• Sircar, D. C. Indian Epigraphy. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi, 1996.
• Taylor, Isaac. History of the Alphabet: Aryan Alphabets. Vol. II. Kessinger Publishing, 2003.
• Wakankar, Laxman S. Ganesh-Vidya: The Traditional Indian Approach to Phonetic Writing. Tata Press/ Script Study Group, Mumbai, 1968.

Historiography / Book History / Type + Culture / Text + Culture / Post-Colonial Studies

• Alvares, Claude. Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1492 to the Present Day. The Other India Press, Mapusa, 1991.
• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. , Routledge, 1994.
• David, Arnold. Everyday Technology: Machines and the making of India’s modernity. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Diehl, Katharine Smith. Early Indian imprints. The Scarecrow Press, 1964
• Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2), Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Febvre, Lucien; Martin, Henri-Jean. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Verso, London, 1976.
• Fraser, Robert. Book history through postcolonial eyes: rewriting the script. Routledge. 2008
• Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” (ed) Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press) I, 1982.
• Gupta and Chakravorty (eds.). Movable Type: book history in India. Permanent Black, 2008
• Gupta and Chakravorty (eds.). Print Areas: book history in India. Permanent Black, 2004
• Kopf, David. British Orientalism and the Bengal renaissance: the dynamics of Indian modernisation 1773–1835. University of California Press, 1969
• Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983.
• Ogborn, Miles. Indian Ink: Script and print in the making of the English East India Company. The University of Chicago Press, 2007
• Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, New York, 1982.
• Pollock, Sheldon. “Literary Culture and Manuscript Culture in Precolonial India.” In Literary Cultures and the Material Book. edited by Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash and Ian Willison, pp 77–94, British Library Publishing, London, 2007.
• Potts, Daniel. British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837: the history of Serampore and its missions. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, 1967
• Qaisar, Ahsan Jan. The Indian response to European Technology and Culture (AD 1498-1707). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.
• Raman, Bhavani. Document Raj: writing and scribes in early colonial south India. The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
• Ranganathan, Murali. Govind Narayan's Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863, Edited by Murali Ranganathan. Anthem Press, Delhi, 2007.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Edited by Ranajit Guha. Subaltern Studies IV: <Writings on South Asian History and Society (Oxford University Press), pp 330–363, 1985.
• Stark, Ulrike. An empire of books: the Naval Kishore Press and the diffusion of the printed word in colonial India. Permanent Black, 2007
• Venkatachalapathy, A. R. The province of the book: scholars, scribes, and scribblers in colonial Tamilnadu. Permanent Black, 2012.

Other Books / Technical Papers

• Bhagwat, S V. Phonemic frequencies in Marathi and their relation to devising a speed script. , Deccan college, Pune, 1961.
• Bist, Gopal Datt. Hindi Typewriting Instructor and Office Manual. Hindustan Offset Press, New Delhi, 1989.
• Dalvi, Girish. Evaluation of Devanagari Typefaces for On screen Legibility. National Workshop on Calligraphy and Typography (CDAC), 2007.
• Maurer, Walter H. On the Name Devanagari. Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 1 (1976): pp 101-104.
• Mudur, S.P., Nayak, N., Shanbhag, S., Joshi, R.K. An Architecture for the Shaping of Indic Texts. Computers and Graphics 23, no. 1:pp 7-24 1999.
• Parida, Laxmi. Vinyas: An Interactive Calligraphic Type Design System. Proc. of the International Conference on Computer Graphics (ICCG 93), pp 355-368, North-Holland Publishing, 1993.

Latin Type Design + Typography Books

• Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements Of Typographic Style. 2nd edition. Hartley and Marks Publishers, 2002.
• Cheng, Karen. Designing Type, Laurence King Publishing, 2006.
• C. Broos. Wim Crouwel: Alphabets, Bis B.V., Uitgeverij(BIS Publishers), 2003.
• Emil Ruder Typographie: A Manual of Design. 1967.
• Eric Gill and Christopher Skelton. An Essay on Typography, David R. Godine Publisher, 1988.
• Fred Smeijers and Robin Kinross. Counterpunch: Making Type in the Sixteenth Century, Designing Typefaces Now. Hyphen Press, London, 1991.
• Frutiger, Adrian. Adrian Frutiger Typefaces — The Complete Works. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag AG, 2009.
• Gerard Unger, While You're Reading Hardcover. Mark Batty, 2007.
• James Craig and Irene Korol Scala. Designing with Type: The Essential Guide to Typography. 5th edition, Watson-Guptil Publications, New York, 2006.
• Jan, Middendorp. Dutch Type. Uitgeverij, 2004
• Jan, Tschold. The New Typography. University of California Press, 1998.
• Kinross, Robin. Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography. Hyphen Press, London, 2002.
• Lawson, Alexander and David R. Anatomy of a Typeface. Godine Press, Boston, 1990.
• Lupton, Ellen. Thinking with Type, Princeton Architectural Press. New York, 2004.
• Noordzij, Gerrit. The stroke: theory of writing. Hyphen Press, London 2005.
• Phil Bains and Andrew Haslam. Type and Typography. Laurence King Publishing, 2005
• Spikermann, Erik and E.M. Ginger. Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works. 2nd edition. Adobe Press, 2003