I've read a lot of books on type and this is the only one with a practical guide on how to create your own typefaces. I'm sure more people who read this book aren't going to start making their own metal type but the lessons learned in this book easily translate to the world of creating digital typefaces. After reading this it changed the way I design typefaces, completely. Now, instean of merely moving bezier control points, I imagine myself cutting metal and re-using counterpunches. Sometimes I "oversize" my counters a bit, as if I were hammering them in a bit more. If you're a type designer, or just interested in type, put this one in your shopping cart immediately.

This is a wonderful book. To write it, Fred Smeijers looked closely at printed books and type punches in museums. He read contemporary accounts of sixteenth century type making. And, informed by his experience as a digital type designer, he understood the problems the sixteenth century type makers faced and how they solved them. Some of these problems, like readability, economy and visual texture, are still with us.

Most remarkably, he also taught himself to make his own steel type punches - his practical experiments shone new light on the subject and showed the implausibility of some accepted accounts of how things were done.

The book is engagingly written. It's a visual delight too, with text set in the author's 'Renard' type and illustrated with his pencil sketches.

Mr Smeijers has crafted a fine book, as all three other reviews have noted. Incisive, insightful, instructive.

Look closely at the cover of this volume. After you've read it, and understand the counterpunch/punch process, you see that the entire story is told on the cover in a bit of brilliant graphic design.

As an author who loves small towns...I felt right at home with Fred Harris's first Okie Dunn novel, "Coyote Revenge." It was like finding a wildflower pressed in an old Bible, or a photograph in a shoebox at the back of the closet.

"Coyote Revenge" was reviewed in the New York Times under Crime Fiction, but the mystery is pretty thin. Who killed the old sheriff? There aren't many suspects, so take your pick. The protagonist, Okie Dunn, is the new sheriff, but there's so little violence and so much examination of personal relationships that I'm tempted to call it a cozy. Police procedures in that time and place consist of shipping a gun off the State Crime Bureau by Mistletoe Express.

"Coyote Revenge" is a small, scrumptious slice of American life in the 1930s. Harris sets his novel in a fictional version of the little southwestern Oklahoma town of Walters. That's where he grew up, and where I was living at about the same time, so I know the territory well.

The story is simple. Okie Dunn is suspended from law school at the University of Oklahoma for decking a professor. He goes home, where his father is dying of lung cancer, and gets work as a cattle trader. When the sheriff, a boyhood buddy, is murdered, Okie pins on the star and sets out to discover "whodunit."

Harris has perfect pitch when it comes to the way we talked back then and there (and still do sometimes). His dialogue is a flawless rendering of what may seem like a foreign language to some readers. His description of the home cooking of that day will ring bells with anyone who grew up on either side of the Red River in the first half of the 20th century. Example:

"Most of Mama's recipes, if she'd ever written them down, would have probably started out with: 'First, get the grease hot.' All the meat we ate -- home-cured ham and sausage, newly killed chicken, a meat-locker steak -- was salted with a heavy hand and then fried nearly stiff. She salted and fried potatoes and mealed-okra, too, in plenty of lard. And Mama's string beans or a mess of greens always went into the pot with a good dose of bacon drippings that she'd saved in a tin can on top of the stove. Then, salted generously, too, they were boiled to kingdom come."

If you want an honest look at life in rural Oklahoma during the bleak years of the Great Depression, in a story told with humor and affection, this is your book...

As a mystery author with my debut novel in its initial release within this culture that worships youth, I suppose I should not reveal my age by admitting I actually once wore a presidential campaign button for the author of this mystery. I would've voted for him too, save for the fact that Fred Harris dropped out of the race long before the California primary. He would've gotten my first ever vote (see, I'm not THAT ancient!), but now I get to vote strongly in favor of his first mystery novel. COYOTE REVENGE is set in Oklahoma during the Depression. Times are tough for everyone, especially Hoyt and Inez Ready. Someone shoots them and then burns down their home. Two years later, the mystery is still unsolved when their son, Dub, dies under dubious circumstances. Dub Ready was sheriff, and the sheriff's job then goes to Okie Dunn, a friend of Dub's who recently returned home after dropping out of law school. Okie begins to investigate the deaths, and the investigation produces some interesting answers. Fred Harris has written a terrific historical mystery here, and it captures its time and place perfectly. I would expect nothing less from a man I still think would have made an excellent president.

I started out giving it five stars, but downgraded to four because the mystery was so easy to solve. However, and this is a big however, the sense of time, place, and people was so right on the nose that I could hear my grandfather's voice coming right out at me off the pages. He was born in the Oklahoma Territory and was one of the "Okies" to migrate to California to be called "fruit tramps." To write in such a way that I could see, hear, and taste the depression era thirties, I think, is evidence of an outstanding writer. To know these people, as Mr. Harris does, makes me understand my own family who were as taciturn as the characters in this book. With a few exceptions, everybody he wrote about came alive as someone I've known and loved.

Perhaps, in the end, the mystery of the story should not be the main focus, but the introduction of these wonderful people who shared the painful, hungry, trying times of the era should be. As I began this review by downgrading, I will end it with upgrading the book back to five stars.

I liked this book - simple rhyming and bold colors in the illustrations make it appealing to children. It teaches a good lesson.

Front Frog Fred and Back Frog Jack is entertaining, a quick read and also teaches. My kids love this story!

This book is great for kids - it combines an interesting story line with practical lessons on life without being 'preachy'.

No other book is more explicit on identifying heliconias, It is the best on the subject and should be used as a guide for other to further explain botanical subjects, on this or another species of plants.

Excellent book. Great help in cultivating and identifying Heliconia. Wish some commercial growers would read this then label their plants accordingly. One can only hope for a ginger book in the future.

I grow heliconias and some other tropical plants. It's become very difficult to identify them since they are known to many names all over the world. Berry and Kress are very clever suggesting to use thier classification and popular names so everybody would understand what others are talking about.

I read Mister Fred in one day. It is seriously funny, and the end made me anxious. The way the writer wrote it, I thought i did'nt like Mister Fred, but I ended up thinking he was really great!!!

Definately one of the best books I have ever read. This is so funny and so good. I've read it at least five times.

We read Mr. Fred aloud at bedtime and we got very little sleep for a few nights. My fifth and second graders kept begging for one more chapter. My Fifth grader was already feeling, like the kids in the book, that she was hitting that pain in the neck stage and no one wanted to teach them. Mr. Fred was the kind of teacher that a bright child wants. And of course only someone very weird would be that interested in Sixth graders. It was fun figuring our how weird. THere were also fun links to other Pinkwater books. It started us on a path through Daniel Pinkwater books. We got this from the library and would love to own one - why don't they re-print?

Howard Roffman is a fine photographer as proved to many, including me, in two of his previous collections, TALES and THREE.

PICTURES OF FRED has, first-rate, candid and more formal portraits of this very young, handsome, French model and gymnast. However, the accompanying text is so precious that it becomes annoying, esp. with several "typos" in only two pages of text. And since this descriptive essay is very brief, appearing at the beginning of the volume with portions reproduced in various other sections of the book, I wondered why it was even included. Why not have a writer as good as Roffman is a photographer write the text and make it much less manipulative? Some of the phrases are actually as melodramatic as the kind found in paperback, romance novels (i.e. "One night I found Fred alone. He seemed sad, withdrawn...The conversation shook me. Fred had kept his wisdom hidden...By the time the sun set, we were both drained. We collapsed on his couch, and he fell asleep in my lap, naked, vulnerable.")

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I'd like some more pictures and alot fewer words, please.

How does Roffman manage to capture so much of his subject's soul in his photographs? That he does so capture it is eveident in this wonderfully rich collection of B&W images.

There are a combination of formally posed and more naturally posed photos, and all seem to connect the reader to the model's core. I feel that B&W is the best medium to capture this aspect of erotic photography as you are not distracted by colour.

Fred, a French gymnast and model, is beautiful. He seems at times both carefree and self-aware. Roffman captures the spark of youth.

You really MUST buy this book; you'lle be pleased that you did.

Howard Roffman captures both the striking beauty of a man and that man's youthful nature. Fred can be seen in a variety of situations, from playing with his dog to being physically excited in a shower. One also sees Fred's compassionate side as he embraces a friend. The lighting is magnificent, accentuating Fred's features. I recommend this book to all those who seek high-quality male photography.

If you love birds, you may want to add this book to your collection. Clearly it is not a field guide: too heavy and bulky. It does, however, contain a great deal of information that will help in the never ending quest to find and identify another bird. Each bird listed has a section on song, behavior, breeding habits, nesting, population, and conservation. Flight patterns, nest identification, and habitat are also described iconically. Good range maps are included. The "photos" will not help much in identifying birds, but a complementary guide such as Sibley's can fill in the gap nicely. Place this book on your coffee table, open it often to learn another tidbit about one of those birds you haven't yet seen, and I don't think it will be disappointing.

This book has more information than any other book I own. You will find birds listed here that you won't find elsewhere and the information offered is second to none. Considering the cost of this book, the value is tremendous. You will find common names, scientific names, very specific identification notes and interesting facts on all the birds listed. In the upper right hand corner of each page is a diagram showing the relative size of the bird to the size of this book and this is very helpful. You'll also find information on breeding, nesting and basic behavioral aspects of each listing. I personally recommend this book to any casual or enthusiastic birder.

This is a great addition to any home or collection. This book has the family, species(latin name),length, wingspan, plumage habitat, weight, nesting, and more for over 930 species of North American birds on over 1000 pages.

_A_Guide_to_Old_English_ deserves its popularity in schools and is probably the best self-contained course in the subject for the general student of English. If you're an independent learner who's gotten it into your head to learn OE, this is also a good choice; in fact, the authors have opened their hearts to autodidacts and help you navigate your way through the book. I would hope, however, that you have already studied at least one inflected language (German is ideal). This book really should be subtitled _A_Reader's_Guide_, since the authors aim is to prepare beginners to decipher actual texts, not just memorize paradigms. To this end they acknowledge up front that many of the declensions are confused in the MSS; they note words likely to cause trouble and warn of places where singular and plural (or different cases, etc.) are likely to be mistaken for each other. The section on syntax is much fuller than is typical of first grammars--evidence of wise heads, as I see it, since syntax is much more important in OE than most students and perhaps some teachers realize. Also included is a long list of conjunctive phrases, a hallmark of OE and as important to know as all the subordinating constructions are in Latin. The reading selections are judiciously chosen, edited, and ordered. Delightful, and uncommon in works of this nature, are the occasional glimpses of the authors' personality that break through now and then: moments of humane warmth, or impatience with bumptious scholars (no names).

What this book lacks, however, is much historical or comparative linguistic detail. You would never know there was such a thing as i-stems, for example. The u-declension of nouns is identified by name, but no such honor is awarded the r-declension. If memory serves, the section on syntax, lengthy and helpful as it is, rarely draws the parallels with German that the reader might be interested to know. Thus students interested in Germanics--the ol' time philology--will need to supplement Mitchell and Robinson very early on in their studies. (If such things are of no interest to you, you may upgrade this review to 5 stars...but shame on you!!)

Mitchell and Robinson's 'A Guide to Old English' is exactly what it claims to be: it smooths the path before the would-be reader of Old English and points out both the obstacles and the areas of interest along the way. It guides the reader through the highways and byways of Old English, and allows him to rapidly gain a reading knowledge of Old English, and some understanding of the workings of the language. Its goal is acquaintance with the tools necessary to decode actual Old English texts, rather than mastery of the language, insofar as composition is a topic omitted altogether. No attempt is made to train the reader to produce Old English.

This guide is not a language textbook in the usual sense of the word. It does not progressively present points of grammar and lists of vocabulary, followed by relevant exercises and translations. Instead, it comprises two parts. The first gives a fairly detailed overview of the grammar and historical context of Old English, whilst the second contains prose and verse texts, accompanied by copious notes, for the reader to attempt. The focus of the first part is not so much the acquisition of paradigms and rules as familiarisation with the general structure of Old English. The section on syntax, very important in Old English, is remarkably comprehensive. The collection of texts in the second part is, in my opinion, well chosen, and representative of the breath of texts in Old English, without dismissing the most famous texts. One particularly useful feature of the guide is its glossary, which contains every word found in the readings, and, for every occurrence of a word in the texts, its part is indicated in the glossary. This simplifies the task of deciphering a text enormously, and obviates the necessity for a separate dictionary.

This sixth edition is not greatly different to the previous editions: minor errors have been corrected, a few small additions on minor points of grammar have been made. The most important change is perhaps the addition of a few texts, e.g., the well-known 'Wulf and Eadwacer', but, all in all, the previous editions were already excellent, and there is no cogent reason to purchase this edition if a previous one is already on hand.

In short, then, Mitchell and Robinson have produced a remarkably usable guide to Old English that is at once instructive and interesting. One could do much worse than to acquire this work if rapid acquisition of reading ability in Old English is desired. As noted by a previous review, the book is not really suited to philologists seeking to understand the history and evolution of English and its place within the Germanic languages. As far as I can tell, this is its single greatest shortcoming, but it doesn't detract much from its purpose. I would heartily recommend this book as an introduction to Old English.

I've personally never read this book (I'll give it 5 stars for being about old english), but I must respond to another's entry here:

from sweet's second anglo-saxon reader, oxford university press- "Neorxenawanges" (or specifically "neorxnawang") means paradise.. from the root of the old teutonic sea deity 'niord', a god of peace. there; now you dont have to buy this book ;-)

The author has done a wonderful job conveying a complex set of issues in a user friendly manner. This killer disease is the subject of intense research and it was good to get an up to date perspective on the topic. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in being empowered on the subject.

This book let me finally understand where my doctor was coming from. I read the book three times, I found it so useful. Being able to understand both the potential dangers that lie ahead and how to avoid them has made me a stronger person as I confront this disease. I have read several other books on hepatitis C, and I liked this one the best. I really liked learning about the PEGYLATED Interferons as well as the safe use of alternative antioxidant treatments along with the ones my doctor is prescribing. This book seems really up to date. I am pumped about it.

Excellent! Up-to-date information in understandable terms! The new edition of Hepatitis C, The Silent Epidemic gives basic explanations and also features recent breakthroughs in the use of PEG Interferon treatments. This paperback brings valuable and hopeful news!

This is not a review really.I agree with all the other reviewers that this is a very good book ,but I find annoying the fact that it has only a few photos out of its 400 pages.The book would really be a gem if it was properly illustrated.The couple of dozen photos that it has are just not enough!

Why so many cookbooks these days? One reason is that anyone can troll the Internet for a few hours and download enough recipes to make a book with very little effort; some "authors" apparently do just that. Not, however, Fred Plotkin, who has produced here not a book but a feast that demands the attention of any serious cook or food-lover.

Fred Plotkin's field is Italy--all Italy (as in "Italy for the Gourmet Traveler," which you should order) and the obscure and less-known regions of Italy, as in this book, which is centered on Friuli-Venezia Giulia, high in the northeast, and in his previous one on Liguria (order that too, while you're at it), the superb "Recipes from Paradise: Life and Food on the Italian Riviera (order that, too). These regions--their very existence--will come as a surprise to many Americans, who have been led by decades of relentless and superficial media coverage to believe that Italy is Tuscany and that Tuscany is only the area between Florence and Siena.

Plotkin doesn't strip-mine a region and bung a lot of recipes into a book. He explores and absorbs it. He visits Italy frequently and has often lived there for extended periods, sharing the life of regions that call out to him. In this case, he writes--elegantly, feelingly--of a region he has known for more than 25 years. For this reason, people and places come alive as welcoming presences.

Recipes? There are recipes galore here, and you will be happy (I hope) to know that that are not the tired (and overhyped) Tuscan retreads. With its Adriatic coast, this region was deeply involved in the Spice Trade at its height, and so you will find many spices used here, some of which (cumin, for example) will come as a surprise.

I recommend this book for cold winter days. It'll warm you just to read it, and then you can start cooking too.

Bill Marsano is a James Beard Award-winning writer on wine, spirits and food.

As Americans living in Italy, my husband & I have used Fred Plotkin's _Italy for the Gourmet Traveller_ as a guidebook when travelling throughout Italy. It has never disappointed us yet. Now we have added this *wonderful* book to our collection. More than a cookbook, this book explores the history and culture of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (where we, quite luckily, happen to live), as well as the cuisine. There are great explanations of the region's different ingredients, herbs & spices, wines, cheeses, coffee, grappa, as well as travel information and sources for some of the harder-to-find ingredients. And then, of course, there are all of the great recipes, each with an author's note (and usually a wine suggestion)! Now I feel doubly fortunate--to have had the chance to live in this region, and also to have acquired this book so I can re-create a little bit of Friuli when we leave.