Trevor Burnham

Let me tell you the tale of a real perfectionist.

There once was a Yale pro­fes­sor by the name of Edward Tufte. He wanted to write a book about the pre­sen­ta­tion of sta­tis­ti­cal data. It was going to be rich in plots and graphs, accom­pa­ny­ing the text on every page. Instead of tiny, clumsy foot­notes, or pageflip-​​inducing endnotes, it would have wide pages with margins per­fectly suited to his numerous cita­tions and inter­jec­tions. It was, alas, going to be an expen­sive book to print. And so, no pub­lisher would take it in its intended form. They would cheapen it, separate the images from the text, make it just another for­get­table academic treatise doomed to gather dust on library shelves. Rather than accept this fate, Edward Tufte decided to self-​​publish the book that would redefine his career: The Visual Display of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion.

Now, when I say “self-​​publish,” you may have visions of Tufte upload­ing a PDF to iUni­verse and ordering a dozen copies. No. This was 1983. Self-​​publishing was an arduous and expen­sive process—but Tufte was obsessed. So, he went all in, taking out a second mortgage and setting up a printing press in his garage.

For­tu­nately, the book was a smashing success, the first in a tetral­ogy of books that have come to define the inter­sec­tion of design and sta­tis­tics. The books are hallowed in both industry and academia for making one of the nerdiest subjects imag­in­able into an utter pleasure acces­si­ble to any reader.

Within this epic arc, there is a smaller story that may yet secure Tufte’s visage a per­ma­nent place in the dic­tio­nary next to the word “per­fec­tion­ist”: When it came time for Tufte to convert his printing process to a purely digital one, it turned out that the digital version of the font he had been using, Bembo, was too spindly for his liking. Whereas an ordinary person would readily accept this minor defi­ciency (aca­d­e­mics commonly publish in Euclid, one of the spindliest fonts ever devised), or switch to some other serif, Tufte worked with pro­fes­sional font design­ers to design a new and improved version of his beloved typeface. Such atten­tion to detail is an inspi­ra­tion to us all.

And so, if you pick up Tufte’s latest book, Beau­ti­ful Evidence, and turn to the colophon seeking elu­ci­da­tion on the book’s typog­ra­phy, here is what you’ll find: “Composed in ET Bembo.”

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