Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers

Review by Crispin Elsted
Parenthesis, 2013

Those familiar with John Lewis’s Printed Ephemera – especially those unable to find a copy – will be the first to rejoice in David Jury’s new book, Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers. Quite apart from its excellent text, the book provides an extraordinary compendium of images of original “jobbing”, from a letterpress legal document of 1610 to the cover of an issue of Printed Salesmanship, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1925. Between those is a gallimaufry of nearly 800 illustrations showing everything from billheads 

and invoices to lottery posters, cigar packages, greeting cards, Paris Metro signage, and not surprisingly, type specimens. There seems to be less emphasis on personal printing – calling cards, invitations, moving cards and the like – than in Lewis’s book, but that is largely because Jury casts the net much wider than Lewis does. The personal is represented, but principally through representation of the appeal to the changes in the arc of taste intrinsic to the times which the book documents: children’s book design and illustration, entertainment posters, decorative border displays, and retail advertising, for example. Much is curiously eye-catching even today. Jury is not above occasionally teasing the reader with pieces which bring up questions manifestly having nothing to do with printing history or graphic design: for a taste, some will be curious to know the nature of the “Extraordinary Performance of the MYSTERIOUS LADY” and her “EXTRAORDINARY ENDOWMENT” set out in a theatre hand-bill of 1842. Is this an early notice of the mono-bosom of  Victorian fashion? 

The text accompanying the illustrations is, as always with David Jury, thoroughly researched, well thought through, and eminently readable. The introduction sets out the nature of the enquiry, which is to “demonstrate the jobbing printer’s design solutions to normal, everyday communication problems” [7] in the period before graphic design became an industry in itself, separated, even divorced, from the compositor at the type case. He makes the point that the history of printing has largely been written by book printers and publishers, for whom the role of the compositor was entirely anonymous. It was only in the less prestigious areas of what came to be called “jobbing” that the comp was turned loose on his own; and it is in such typographical expressions of persuasion that the taste and skill of the individual printer and compositor could be seen. In contrast to the printer of books, ‘the preserver of all other arts’, the jobbing printer consorted with the everyday vulgarities of trade and commerce. “The nature of what was being communicated” – Jury remarks – “was not only superficial and mundane, but also sometimes morally questionable.” [6]

There is no particular ‘side’ to Jury’s thesis, nor to his setting out of evidence and example, although it is clear enough that he both enjoys and admires much of the work he shows, and he is clearly no ‘elitist’ – to use the word in its present-day corrupted sense. This is a fair-minded exhibition of a particular strain in printing and typography, and like all the best books, credits the reader with the intelligence to arrive at his or her own conclusions as to what constitutes good or bad work, or what is tasteless and what is not – if indeed taste is even under consideration here.             

In thinking about this book , I compared it to Lewis’s Printed Ephemera, but also in its spirit to Vincent Steer’s ‘typographer’s bible’, Printing Design and Layout, published in 1934 and reprinted a number of times. Steer, who founded the British Typographer’s Guild and was proud to give his occupation as ‘compositor’, makes an interesting statement in the opening chapter of his book which tallies nicely with David Jury’s. He makes the point that in earlier centuries “[the] master printer was still a craftsman, more interested in typographical arrangement than in business finance.” [Steer, 2] Nor was he faced with the continual problem of choosing among scores of different type designs. Steer then goes on to say that

[at] the beginning of the present century, however, the need for an intervening stage between the [copy for setting] and the printed word became acute. The printing industry had been split up into sections and where one man formerly performed all the operations necessary in the production of a piece of printing, now many specialists were  required. Printers had lost the art of designing their own work and were  soon to lose the proud privilege of doing so. [ibid. Italics mine]

This falls solidly behind Jury’s thesis, and is interesting as demonstrating that even as late as the 1930s the attitude which had prevailed in earlier times still held on. 

Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers is organized into six sections, each developing a set of ideas or a particular perspective on the subject of the changes developing in the business of printing between the 18th century and the end of the First World War. These include the physical make-up of the 18th century printing office and the function of the engraver in providing titling and ornament as jobbing printing slowly became introduced; the rise of the middle class in  the early 19th century and the growing need to print greater quantities in a shorter time; packaging and retail advertising, together with informational printing for travel and for local transport, such as the Baedeker and train schedules; the rise of artistic printing and competition amongst printers eager to show their decorative abilities, which led  to the proliferation of type specimen books and – because of competition from continental printers – the shift from a seven-year apprenticeship to the creation of technical schools devoted to printing and design; poster design and printing, and the rise of mechanized composition; and finally, the appearance of the designer or typographer as a separate entity from the compositor-printer of earlier days. 

The physical design of the book, also by David Jury, is masterly. Each of the text chapters is printed on a pale green sheet which contrasts with the matt-finish calendared paper used for the following illustrative sections. The elegantly informative captions always occupy the top sixth of the page grid, with the coloured illustrations spread below, and Jury has made quick reference easier by ensuring that the bold caption heads for sections of illustrations– ‘Popular printed matter’; ‘Advances in label design’; ‘Freeform lettering’, and so forth – always appear on the upper left of a page, more often than not on the verso. In this way they act much as running heads would in a more traditionally designed book. The pages throughout the book are tightly laid out, with minimal margins on all sides. In the illustration sections the sans serif text runs ragged right in four columns; in the text sections we have roman in two right-justified columns, with the black and white illustrations falling in a variety of positions – top, bottom, straddling columns, stacked. The result is a pleasing shift from a text page with blended and rhythmically varied illustration, to a subtly regimented layout in the illustrative sections –informational captions on top, exemplars below, drawing the eye to ‘read’ the pictures almost as one would encyclopedic entries.

The book is hardbound in a printed paper with thumbnail images, and a flat spine. My only slight quibble is that there is no title or author’s name on the spine of the book itself, although the Thames & Hudson logo is given room. However, the dust-wrapper (rather an irritating affair only 9 inches high against the book’s 11.5 inch height, and consequently reminiscent of the rather sad tummy shirts worn by would-be matelots on continental beaches angling for a pick-up) does include the title and author as well as the usual flaps with blurbs. 

That negligible raspberry aside, Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers is an essential book for several reasons: its intelligent and wide-ranging text, its hoard of rich illustration, and the brilliant way in which the author/designer has orchestrated and ordered all his materials so that the book is instantly and continuously useful while remaining one in which it is a pleasure to browse informatively for hours. David Jury is, with Robert Bringhurst, among the very few writers and printing historians providing substantial and contemporary accounts of the engrossing history and – despite the odds – enticing future of the book.