In the day's work

In the day's work by Daniel Berkeley Updike is a collection of craft essays on typography and printing written in the early 20th century. It is a practitioner’s treatise that blends design theory with shop-floor guidance, focusing on how to plan, compose, and present printed work so it is both useful and beautiful; in short, it is about the principles and practice of good typography.

The book first explains how to plan printing: organizing specimen books, guiding clients toward appropriate choices, and designing pages by starting from purpose, reader, and constraints, then testing the “normal” page against special elements like tables, verse, and illustrations. It argues that suitability, simplicity, and proportion are the heart of style, drawing lessons from Renaissance books and warning against archaic affectation or fussy decoration. The closing essay turns practical and prescriptive, naming the essentials that determine a page’s success—even word spacing and sensible hyphenation, modest paragraph indents and sentence spacing, thoughtful leading, truly black ink, paper whose tone and surface suit the type, and correct imposition with balanced margins—while insisting that the conscientious printer’s judgment is the final champion that makes the work “right.”