. . . does visually what intonation does audibly: it emphasises the important, subordinates the less important, so clarifying the message. There is more to it than that, however. Just as the impact of the spoken word is affected by the appearance of the speaker, so is the impact of the printed word affected by the overall appearance of the sheet or page.”
This struck me as the best thing in Brooke Crutchley”s To Be a Printer (Cambridge University Press, 1980). However I think it needs slight qualification. Authors have to get this “intonation” through the services of a book designer. This makes the situation a bit more like that of an actor, surely. The actor’s delivery will be directed by the Director, so some of their intonation will be the Director’s not just their own.
Regrettably the individualized design of the text of a book is a much less common happening than it was when Mr Crutchey was working at the University Printing House in Cambridge from 1930 to 1974.
Making Book 
I like your analogy with intonation. I wondered about qualifying it on the grounds that good design should be invisible, but I suppose there’s a parallel there too, in that you don’t always realise just how a good actor is managing to express the meaning of a text so fully and (apparently) effortlessly.
I fondly remember the ‘design meetings’ at CUP when I started. There would be a high-powered conclave of all the senior people (including the UPH consultant designer John Dreyfus) scrutinising the specimen pages that used to be designed for a wide range of non-series books. They all immediately recognised all the typefaces, of course, and talked expertly about their special features and the character they would lend to a book. I remember Michael Black once saying, ‘This is Baskerville, and I am its hound’. It may however be a false memory that PGB once got out his printer’s magnifying glass and pronounced that one of the full points was (wrongly) in an italic font. Is that possible?.
There was also minute discussion of the size, spacing or location of elements like the folios, subheads, displayed quotations, notes, chapter openings and page-heads. A real education for junior staff like me but extravagantly labour-intensive, of course. Happy days.
I think one of the best things about working at a university press was that every day you’d learn something new.
As to the PGB story. I have heard this story too, though I can’t be sure it was told of PGB or of someone else. Whether it really was him or not it could well have been the sort of show he’d put on. But is it true? — I mean is an italic period distinguishable from a Roman one? A circle in upright alignment tends to look pretty much like a circle on its side. But I hesitate to insist that there are no typefaces in which the period isn’t a circle but is more of an oval. If such a font exists Burbidge’s eagle eye may well have detected it!