R graphs: Creating Tufte's horizontal bar lines

Question

How can we replicate Tufte\'s implicit horizontal lines in R?

For example, the following

Answer 1

Not a big addition to @Andrie answer, but you can take an advantage of the package ggthemes to make Tufte-sque plots with ggplot2. Below, I'm using theme_tufte, change the font using extrafont package, and use opts to fine-tune all the other visual features:

library(ggthemes)
library(extrafont)
ggplot(msleep, aes(x=order)) + stat_bin(width=0.6, fill="gray") + 
  theme_tufte(base_family="GillSans", base_size=16, ticks=F) +
  theme(axis.line=element_blank(), axis.text.x=element_blank(),
        axis.title=element_blank()) +
  geom_hline(yintercept=seq(5, 20, 5), col="white", lwd=1.2)