Pyramidographia: or a description of the pyramids in Aegypt
Pyramidographia, a 1646 London scholarly treatise by the astronomer John Greaves, describes the Egyptian pyramids using testimony from classical authors such as Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo and Pliny. The pictures are plain letterpress details: a dense horizontal hatched square, a decorative woodcut initial I with interlaced scrollwork, a large ornamented opening H beside running text, and a row of faint vertical rules. A designer could take from them the restrained typographic toolkit of seventeenth-century printing, with its ornamental initials and hatched tonal blocks.
