In 1525 Albrecht Dürer, the supreme draughtsman of the German Renaissance, set out to build the alphabet itself from geometry. Of the Just Shaping of Letters, drawn from his treatise on measurement, constructs each Roman capital with compass and straightedge — proportion by proportion — so that the letterforms carved on ancient monuments could be reproduced with mathematical certainty.
It is a founding document of typography, and the meeting point of art and mathematics at its most literal. Download the free EPUB and watch a great artist prove that an A can be beautiful because it is correct.