By Accident or Design

More about the book

In this reflective autobiography, Rosemary Sassoon, a leading expert on handwriting and typography, looks back on her long and varied career, paying special attention to her unorthodox progression through a variety of fields. She details the route that took her from design to the educational and medical aspects of handwriting problems, then on to research and a PhD, and finally to working in the area of legibility in type design. In telling the story of an unusual and unusually successful life, Sassoon takes up a number of philosophical questions about what it is that comes together to form our characters, and what role chance and coincidence play in our lives.