John Howard Benson was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1901, attended the public schools, and, after five years of study at the Art Students League in New York, returned to live there. His mother, whose considerable artistic flair made her appreciate his similar inclination, was ambitious for him in this field. Disregarding the rather [...]

Aeltestesbewahrt mit Treue,
Freundlich aufgefasstes Neue. . . .
—Goethe
The destruction of the firm of Poeschel & Trepte in November 1943 and the death of Carl Ernst Poeschel five months later marked the end of a career which more than any other had helped to bring German printing back into the mainstream of a European tradition. In the early [...]

On a brisk autumn morning, I boarded an early ferry out of Port Jefferson. As the ferry quietly glided over the gently rippling water, I thought about the design legend waiting for me on the other side of Long Island Sound.
Bradbury Thompson is a designer I’ve admired for years. Although I’d never met him before in person, I was familiar [...]

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who died on the twenty-third of April, 1924, was recognized by architects, the world over, as a master in his chosen profession; to those who love books he was a master of the Craft of Printing. A great artist is always a great artist, and Goodhue, even in his short lifetime (for he was only fifty-five) [...]

The passing of Oswald Cooper leaves for many of us an unfillable void. Where can we turn in these days to find another truly great man so utterly unimpressed by his own importance?
The story of Cooper has a definite homespun quality. It is no mere coincidence that various people in speaking or writing of Cooper have [...]

In the person and the practice of Jan Tschichold we have a fresh example of the difficulty of making plain common sense prevail, even in so old a craft as typography. The difficulty is by now largely past, for today Tschichold is acclaimed and honoured for an achievement truly international. His 30 years’ work in every field [...]

“There was a great sum of accomplishment in this practical artist. He was a designer and a philosopher, a writer and a craftsman, a printer who preached of beauty in utility. In his time he won vast acclaim and once it was said that half of the display lines in a national magazine were set in Goudy type. His was a truly great [...]

If we may properly glorify the appellation of Genius, certainly Frederic Goudy was born to enrich typography and the printed word, and thus achieve immortality in our great Art Preservative of All Arts.
From hand lettering and decorative design of his earliest work, in the eighteen-nineties, to type design and printing was a natural transition and development in [...]

In the late ’nineties I began the study of printing and the design of types; by 1925 I had made many drawings for types for which matrices were engraved for me by the late Robert Weibking of Chicago. His work was technically satisfactory but I did not feel that the types cast from them carried fully into print [...]

It is now almost twenty-two years since the death of America’s most widely known and respected type designer, Frederic W. Goudy. The bare chronological facts state that he was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 8, 1865, and died in his home at Deepdene, Marlboro-on-Hudson on May 11,1947. Beginning in 1895, and ending in 1944, [...]

Friends, relations, colleagues and former pupils of Eric Gill were among the participants in two centenary events held last week.
After hearing the homage paid to Eric Gill’s art and way of life at last week’s two centenary events, it came as a shock to read what some of his detractors had to say about him, as recorded [...]

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was born in Brighton in 1882 and apprenticed as an architect of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1900. He married Ethel Mary Moore in 1904 and, three years later, joined a community of artist craftsmen in Ditchling, Sussex, where he did some printing and illustration. He left Ditchling in 1924 and lived at [...]

At his own press, the Officina Bodoni, Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig has for half a century combined scholarly research and fine craftsmanship. A bibliography of his work is now proposed.
‛Scholarly publishing,’ in the widest sense, exactly describes the work which Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig began at Montagnola di Lugano in 1922 and still continues at Verona. Giovanni Mardersteig was [...]

On assessing the early work by Jan van Krimpen one is struck by the seemingly Germanic influence apparent in design and letterform. It is only after one realizes that, at the moment van Krimpen became interested in them, German printing and lettering manifested the teachings of Johnston and Gill, that this influence is seen to [...]

Imre Reiner has an international reputation as a type designer. But other aspects of his work are not so well known. Here we show some examples of that work, ad rather than ask a critic to write at length concerning their aesthetic implications we asked the designer himself to give us a brief record of his life. Over [...]

Two years ago The Monotype Corporation paid tribute to Dr. Giovanni Mardersteig on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday by issuing a limited edition of a publication devoted to his typographic work with ‛Monotype’ faces. In view of the great interest shown in this publication, we are here printing an adaptation of the introductory essay by John [...]

Octavius A. Dearing, who developed the “California” typecase, was born in East Buxton, York County, Maine, on September 28, 1840. On August 30, 1862, he enlisted in Company E, First Regiment of Maine Cavalry Volunteers, for service in the Civil War. On his enlistment papers he described himself as a “printer.” He developed varicose veins [...]

The issue of the Printer and Bookmaker for December 1899 contains an interesting article entitled “The Lay of the Case.”¹ The author writes: “The printers’ type-case bears evidence that the original cases of the early typographers were arranged with the boxes in alphabetical order, and as this would be the natural method of a man familiar [...]

There are many ways by which an artist may give expression to his vision. He may take a piece of marble and chisel it into a form of beauty; he may take a drab of canvas and with a brush transform it into a thing of delight; he may take a piece of paper and, making a few marks with his pen, [...]