Currently reading The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat. First published in 1951. It’s a great book so far, but on the purely material level it’s a great example of why I find mid-century typesetting—with this nicely weighted version of Janson in both Roman and italics, the dropcaps, the chapter numbers in brackets—typographical comfort food. Several of John Gardner’s books on writing, Shelby Foote’s Civil War, and some of Cormac McCarthy (up to at least the Border Trilogy) are very similar.