Joshua Yaffa of The Washington Monthly calls Edward Tufte The Information Sage:
Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri. His mother graduated high school at the age of thirteen, and four years later she became the first female reporter at the Omaha World-Herald. His father was an engineer, and Tufte remembers his parents’ marriage as the first sign that “words and numbers belong together.”
He studied statistics at Stanford and then went on to get a doctorate in political science at Yale. In 1967, he took a job teaching at Princeton. While there, Tufte was asked to give a course on statistics to a group of visiting journalists and, in looking for examples to include in the course packet, quickly became dissatisfied with the available primers on how to represent data. They were either too shallow and unserious or hopelessly arcane. He began to write up some ideas of his own.
A few years later, Tufte moved to Yale. He became friendly with Inge Druckrey, a German-born designer and teacher who had studied in the 1960s at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland, then an incubator for modernist style. The two would talk about design theory, and Tufte would visit Druckrey’s classes to critique student work. Before long, the two began dating.
Soon, Tufte’s notes on information design had grown into a book-length manuscript. He showed it around to publishers, who insisted on redesigning many pages in the book, and imagined it as a niche title, only worth printing a couple thousand copies. Frustrated, Tufte took out a second mortgage on his home at 18 percent interest to print the book himself. He spent most of the next summer with a book designer named Howard Gralla. The two of them sat side by side in Gralla’s apartment, eating bagels and rearranging text so words and images would be woven together on the page. “Self-publishing,” Tufte told me, “allowed for an incredible, bizarre fussiness.”
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information came out in April 1983. To save costs, Tufte told the printer to bind only half of the initial print run of 5,000 copies. The book is now in its twentieth printing, and is one of the most successful self-published books of all time.