Common Lisp: the Language by Guy L. Steele Jr.
I was prompted into finishing this post which has been long-sitting in my drafts by Paolo Amoroso’s reminder that Common Lisp: the Language was published 40 years ago. Common Lisp is a programming language and was an attempt to synthesize out of the many similar-but-not-compatible languages in the Lisp family a ‘common’ Lisp which would help programmers, vendors, suppliers, textbook writers, and so on.
Affectionately known as CLtL (the 2nd edition being known as CLtL2), Guy L. Steele’s comprehensive work was a standard reference for Lisp programmers and helped organize the multi-year effort to make Common Lisp a standard. Some of the languages on which Common Lisp was built and drew (variously known as Lisps or Lisp-like languages) are featured on the cover of CLtL in Windsor’s Outline style. Common Lisp as a language was successful to the extent that of those, only Scheme and Common Lisp survive today in any recognisable form.
The first edition cover is entirely typographic, using Eras for author (in white) and the title (in teal and white), with “COMMON” being made large, and “LISP” very large. All on a silver background. The book design is credited to David Ford.
The second edition replaces teal with red, and silver with pale-cyan. Gone are the other Lisp-like languages (not just a whimsical design choice, by 1990 when the 2nd edition was published, Common Lisp had essentially won: every major Lisp vendor had or claimed to have an implementation of Common Lisp). The new graphic is an illustration by the author of the mathematical function (z-1)/(z+1) in the complex plane. There are similar graphics of several functions in the Numbers chapter. The graphics are all produced directly from PostScript programs and incorporated directly into the digitally produced camera ready copy (from the Colophon); the PostScript programs themselves are generated by a Common Lisp program which is listed in the book.
The colophon of the second edition also goes to some lengths to document the tweaks made to Letter Gothic, used for displaying code: the accents grave, acute, circumflex, and tilde have been borrowed from a larger font-size and shifted; /hyphen and /equal have been replaced or redrawn; and in #, /numbersign, the gap has been eliminated. The programming language Common Lisp has a fairly high frequency of such characters, and some of them can be seen in the program fragment.
The colophon also attests to the second edition being printed on a Linotron 300 (but sadly, not who designed the covers).
Detail of interior page showing a fragment of the Common Lisp program used to generate the PostScript program used to generate the diagrams (as seen on cover).
3 Comments on “Common Lisp: the Language by Guy L. Steele Jr.”
The first cover has got to be one of the weirdest pairing of typefaces I’ve ever seen.
I’m glad you like it ;)
Maybe Mark and his keen eye for pairings is on to something. There are more than 25,000 articles on FontsInUse, so i thought this search query for both Eras and Windsor would come up with a few more hits. But no, just this article here (and that’s not even accounting for this bonus weirdness of using the outline style).
fontsinuse.com/search/advan…