"But letterforms are not only objects of science. They also belong to the realm of art, and they participate in its history. They have changed over time just as music, painting and architecture have changed, and the same historical terms -- Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, and so on -- are useful in each of these fields.
This approach to the classification of letterforms has another important advantage. Typography never occurs in isolation. Good typography demands not only a knowledge of type itself, but an understanding of the relationship between letterforms and the other things that humans make and do. Typographical history is just that: the study of the relationships between type designs and the rest of human activity -- politics, philosophy, the arts, and the history of ideas. It is a lifelong pursuit, but one that is informative and rewarding from the beginning."
-- Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
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