As Catherine Pickstock so forcefully demonstrates in her brilliant introduction to this new publication of Beauty Looks After Herself, for 600 or more years, the Real has been progressively stripped of transcendental content, so that today an "unbearable lightness of being" presents us with the terrible spectacle of numberless possibilities evacuated of all substantive content. A middlebrow landscape of normal nihilism surrounds us at every turn.

Eric Gill saw through our dilemma long ago. Here, in essays on industrialism, architecture, stone-carving, lettering, clothes, philosophies of...

Eric Gill's opinionated manifesto on typography argues that 'a good piece of lettering is as beautiful a thing to see as any sculpture or painted picture'. This essay explores the place of typography in culture and is also a moral treatise celebrating the role of craftsmanship in an industrial age. Gill, a sculptor, engraver, printmaker and creator of many classic typefaces that can be seen around us today, fused art, history and polemic in a visionary work which has been hugely influential on modern graphic design. 'Written with clarity, humility and a touch of humour . . . timeless and...