Type Faces, Old and New

"Reprinted by the University Press, Oxford, from the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society - The Library - Sept 1935."

And elsewhere:

"150 copies reproduced in facsimile for The Bibliographical Society by The Monotype Corporation Limited using photo-litho process equipment and a 'Primalith' small-offset printing machine supplied by Pictorial Machinery Limited. Sept 1957."

16 finely designed and printed ivory antique wove leaves, including one gatefold, sewn into limp grey covers printed in black on the first face only.

HISTORICAL NOTE. With her mentor and later colleague Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde was one of the two leading British typographers of the first third of the twentieth century and beyond.

DIRECT LINE TO SOUTH AFRICA. At least two of Beatrice Warde's later apprentice/pupils immigrated to South Africa and enriched the craft of fine print design, printing and book production in that country. They were both proud of their direct lineage to Stanley Morison through Warde. The first of these was Alan Dodson, who was responsible for much of the fine work produced by Hortors in Johannesburg from the late-1950s. The second was Michael Barnett, an independent, who consulted to and influenced the style of several leading publishers in Johannesburg and beyond from the early-1970s, perhaps earlier. [One of Barnett's smaller clients was a group of publishers including Building Publications, Bolton Publications and Fontein Books, the last of which recently discovered this extremely rare item for this auction.]

Beatrice Warde was a prolific author and campaigner for the best possible typographical standards. This 32 pp b/w illustrated item is a good example, surveying as it does several hundred years of influences and styles, mainly from Britain and other countries in Western Europe. This lot is particularly interesting for Warde's discussion of the development of what is still one of the world's most popular typefaces after eighty years. This is "Times" - once incorrectly believed to have been the work of Stanley Morison, her own mentor and colleague and whose subsequent biography she wrote. Warde writes, however, that between 1930 and 1932 two designers on the staff of The Times newspaper evolved this typeface with the technical assistance of two type foundries, first Monotype and then Linotype.

This reprinted booklet also refers to the work of the eminent type designer (and stone-cutter) Eric Gill (whose faces includes "Gill Sans", "Perpetua" and "Joanna").