My apologies to those few, frequent readers for being absent these last couple months. Construction of the studio has been consuming all of my time and I am happy to say it is nearly finished. Or rather, it is nearly to the point where I can use it for its intended purposes.

Readers of Typocurious may also be wondering where its brother blog, the Alexander S. Lawson Archive has gone. Our web guru tells us the server was ‘compromised’ and the blog remains in internet limbo until all that gets sorted out by people much smarter than me.

Meanwhile, Typocurious gets to pick up the slack. Our monthly birthday-related tributes fell apart back in April. Since then we’ve missed the opportunity to post material on Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Adrian Frutiger, Robert Hunter Middleton, William Addison Dwiggins, and Will Bradley. Come September I hope to get the plan back on track with a few posts on S.H. de Roos and Pierre Simon Fournier. If you hadn’t noticed I was deploying some stopgap measures by posting some random biographical material on Bradbury Thompson and Carl Ernst Poeschel I had sitting in the drafts bin.

But now I am taking advantage of some of those same ‘private posts’ and am pleased to post a biography of one of my many typographic heroes, John Howard Benson. So little material on his work is out there and that’s a damn shame in my humble opinion. I received a great article on John Howard Benson from TypoC’s good friend Michael Russem of the Katran Press (that article I will post next week) and that reminded me I had a couple of posts on him resting in the wings.

So for no good reason other than “I have it and I can” and the simple fact everyone should learn more about Benson, here is “John Howard Benson: A Brief Biography” by his widow Esther Fisher Benson.

As ever, thanks for reading and enjoy this avocational endeavor in the realm of printing history. Be a sport and post some comments (I like comments) and hire a local letterpress printer for that next design job of yours.

TyPoCurious