A typographer in post-war Britain
In 1946 John Lewis, reflecting on his experience as an occasional mural painter and meagre freelance illustrator before the War, concluded ‘it did not seem much of a foundation on which to build a career’. Yet, two years later, he would be giving a lecture on typography to students at the Royal College of Art. The question this begs to be asked is, what did it mean to be ‘a typographer’ in post-war Britain?
The period 1946 to 1949 was a cathartic time for British typography. The quiet ‘discipline and humility’ – hallmarks of pre-war ‘new traditionalist’ typography led by Oliver Simon, Francis Meynell and Stanley Morison to encourage the printer to aspire to ‘fine press’ standards – had been usurped during the Second World War. The less subtle and highly effective co-ordination of public information by the Ministry of Information (MOI) had resulted in the advertising industry growing in both stature and kudos. Very different, but equally successful, had been the Design Research Unit (DRU) set up in 1943 by Herbert Read, Misha Black and Milner Gray. The DRU was the first consultancy in the country to pull together expertise from architecture, graphics and industrial design within a single practice.
Typography as a profession, meanwhile, especially outside the print industry, remained a vague and largely unacknowledged activity in Britain. Membership of the Society of Typographic Designers in 1949 (established in 1928 and at that time still called the British Typographer’s Guild) was just 117, although it was later claimed that Printing and Layout, the book written by the Society’s founder Vincent Steer, sold 18,000 copies between 1934 and 1958. There were about 120 advertising agencies, mostly based in London, perhaps 20 major book publishers and a dozen magazine publishers, whilst many of the larger commercial companies had their own publicity departments. It has been deduced that the number of typographers in Britain in 1946 was around 600, although this is likely to be an over-estimate. Indeed, Robert Harling wrote shortly after the war that there was no more than ‘a dozen leading figures with a few score imitators’. Yet the printing and paper industries were buoyant, employing approximately 279,000 and functioning, for the most part, unaffected and, it must be assumed, unaware of the tiny number of typographic designers.
This situation was vividly demonstrated when, immediately after the war, Francis Meynell was invited to be Typographic Adviser to the nation’s publisher Her Majesty’s Stationery office (HMSO). His success as typographer and publisher of the Nonesuch Press since 1923 and his subsequent knowledge of the British printing industry in general was key to this unpaid appointment. Remarkably, although the HMSO was the largest publisher in the world, it had no more than ‘one layout man and one graphic artist’. Meynell accepted the role on condition that a design department be established and persuaded Harry Carter, a master printer of high regard and who had been Meynell’s production manager at the Nonesuch Press, to run it. Eyebrows were raised. Change was in the air, but in shops, factories and offices across the nation, deferment seemed the only ‘plan’ in hand.
It was Lynton Lamb who offered Lewis’ post-war career a direction. Pondering the future, he suggested, ‘As you have illustrated books and collected books all your life, why don’t you design them?’ Shortly after, another of Lewis’ coterie told him of a job on offer in East Anglia where a printing company was setting up a design studio. Lewis, bewildered as to the point of this information; ‘Why me?’ was reminded ‘Well you like sailing don’t you? Lots of water up there.’ The distracted way Lewis fell into the occupation of typographer (admittedly not the expected career for a boy educated at Charterhouse – his father was livid!) highlights the lack of a recognised career path for the subject. Lewis’s autobiography is whimsically titled Such Things Happen. The book also has a sub-title: The life of a typographer; presumably an ironic quip since it contains nothing about typography whatsoever.
Lewis began work as the first in-house designer at the printing company W. S. Cowell Ltd in Ipswich. Geoffrey Smith, its enterprising joint-managing director knew that the provision of a design service was essential to his company’s future (he was a member of the Double Crown Club so he knew Simon, Meynell and Morison) even though he had little idea of what design actually entailed. Lewis, of course, was equally ignorant about printing and typography.
Cowell’s, already one of Britain’s leading printers, was keen to expand into the production of books. To this end, and to Lewis’ horror, the first project he was assigned was ‘a type book’, intended to promote Cowell’s printing credentials. Published the following year, A Handbook of Printing Types is effectively an illustrated type book, achieved by augmenting the display of Monotype faces held in Cowell’s composing room with additional artwork commissioned by Lewis from artists such as Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland.
The result was concise, clear, and tasteful, if benign; overall, an affectionate assimilation of British typographic taste from the 1920s and 30s. Lewis was a resourceful learner and the project proved the perfect vehicle with which to teach himself about typography and printing. The book was also well received by the trade press, Cowell’s were happy with their typographic designer and Lewis would gladly repeat the formula ad infinitum. It was his work for the first Aldeburgh Festival held in 1948 that caused Ruari McLean to invite Lewis to deliver a typography lecture to his students at the RCA: an institution riven by a need to change yet unable or unwilling to abandon the romantic Arcadia that was, for many, pre-war Britain.
During his initial year at Cowell’s, Lewis was helped by Robert Harling who, in Lewis’ autobiography, heroically appears at just the right moment to save him from calamity. Further wisdom was gained by the arrival of ‘beautifully marked-up layouts’, posted to Cowell’s from a real design studio housed at Penguin Books. These layouts, drawn by Ruari McLean, became a yardstick for Lewis and his recently appointed assistant John Brinkley, another ex-public schoolboy wondering what he was doing in a typographic design studio and who would also find himself teaching the subject at the RCA (more of this later).
However, if Lewis sought a role model, Oliver Simon would probably come closest to matching the situation Lewis found himself in. Simon belonged to the previous generation who pioneered the establishment of the ‘typographic designer’ when he joined the Curwen Press in 1921. Working in Curwen’s London office – shared by Stanley Morison who had recently been made typographic consultant to the Monotype Corporation – Simon also designed and edited the first four issues of Fleuron; the ground-breaking typographic journal published (almost) annually from 1923 until 1930, and as Morison remarked, the first to be aimed at ‘...that far more important man the printer’s customer’ rather than the printer.
In 1946 there were several excellent typographic journals to provide Lewis with discerning reading matter. Monotype’s journal, the Monotype Recorder, edited on an ad-hoc basis by Morison and, more often, Beatrice Warde, was dispatched free to all companies, such as Cowell’s, who had bought Monotype equipment. Simon’s Signature, launched in 1946, was probably the most important (his book, Introduction to Typography had been published the previous year by Penguin). A broader context for typography was provided by Harling who had designed and edited Typography before the war and, in 1946, set up Alphabet and Image. Typography and Signature both featured work of the European avant-garde –Typography carrying the first serious article on Jan Tschichold’s work to be published in Britain. But despite these occasional forays into European modernism, the demeanour of these journals remained true to ‘new traditionalism’ heralded by the Fleuron. In the circumstances, and considering Lewis’ complete lack of typographic training it is no surprise he resorted to imitating his successful, if elder, contemporaries.
At the heart of ‘new traditionalism’ (never a ‘movement’ – such an immodest conceit would be quite unacceptable) was a working process that assumed parity of status between typographic designer and printer. Simon, Meynell and Morison in their different ways all found themselves close enough to the composing room to smell the residue ink and cleaning fluids – Meynell, with his family ties to the printing industry, even set up his own small typographic workshop with which to design and set trial title pages for his Nonesuch Press books before being printed by choice commercial printers such as Curwen, Kynoch and Cambridge University Presses. A tacit knowledge of metal type remained a significant part of what it meant to be a typographer and yet, without a union membership card, access to the printer’s composing room was all-but impossible. On top of this, instructing a compositor who, understandably, deeply resented being told how to do his job, could be an onerous task requiring, quite apart from knowledge of the compositor’s hidden working process, a mature standard of diplomacy.
Not surprising, the typographic designer was considered an interloper whose knowledge was too often cursory, providing what many printers considered to be little more than a decorative flourish to the compositor’s work. ‘Real’ typographers – renowned master printers – still enjoyed (at least to the extent allowed by fraternal codes of modesty) legendary status within the printing and design fraternity. Yet at the pinnacle of their profession, all were working in partnership with typographic designers less reluctant to announce their talents, for example: Harold Curwen (Curwen Press) worked with Oliver Simon; Harry Carter (Nonesuch Press and Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) with Francis Meynell; and Walter Lewis (Cambridge University Press) with Stanley Morison.
The symbiotic relationship forged by these and others in the decades between the wars was what Cowell’s hoped for when they set up their design studio and employed Lewis to lead it. A shared sense of deference, initially helped by mutual levels of ignorance, enabled Cowell’s design studio to be a success. Nevertheless, as Lewis’ confidence and reputation grew, it became clear that stresses caused by status and ego, to say nothing of conditions of work at the print works in Ipswich, caused Lewis to find reasons to spend an increasing amount of his time working from Cowell’s London office. His opinion of the trade printer would remain far from complimentary.
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That design be recognised as a distinct process quite separate from manufacturing was one of the promotional aims of the government-backed exhibition Britain Can Make It, held at the V&A in 1946. More than 3,000 items by nearly 80 designers of technology, fashion, textiles, and household goods were displayed (Misha Black’s Design Research Unit was well represented). Modernist ideology was prominent throughout the exhibition although there was little evidence of its application to the role of typography.
Nevertheless, one of the earliest glimpses of modernism in British printed form appeared elsewhere in 1946. It was a book, designed by Hans Schleger (‘Zéró’) The Practice of Design, written by Herbert Read and printed and published by Lund Humphries. The book’s impact – described as ‘a revelation’ by Ken Garland – is difficult to comprehend today without an appreciation of how insular England had become. The Bauhaus, for example, remained virtually unknown despite having been the subject of a hugely influential exhibition (for Americans at least) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1938. National foreboding during the thirties followed by the cataclysm of war itself had undoubtedly been a major cause of British isolationism, but in its aftermath there was a rapid reassessment. A revision of manners and values after the tumult was inevitable. Something brighter and more colourful, above all ‘something different’, was sought. America was ready to oblige.
A half-page advertisement for Paul Rand’s book Thoughts on Design, appeared in Signature in March 1947. Simon, Signature’s editor and designer, mischievously placed Rand’s typographic notice opposite the opening page of a warm homage to Stanley Morison, Simon’s long-time colleague. The American’s announcement, modest yet still startling to the point of incongruous amid Simon’s prudent typography, reflected Rand’s fascination (and Morison’s abhorrence) for the work of European designers such as Jan Tschichold, Herbert Bayer and László Moholy -Nagy. The latter’s first American book, The New Vision, published in 1938, had been a major influence on Rand. (This was the same year that the Bauhaus exhibition took place at MoMA and a year after Moholy-Nagy had taken up his position as first Director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago.) Rand’s irreverent presence in Signature, sanctuary of British typographic restraint, was a reminder that America had not only taken in and accommodated the European moderns but actively sought to celebrate their ideology.
The success of Rand’s Thoughts on Design, was the likely reason for the reissuing of Layout in Advertising the following year (1948); a book by another, and arguably, even more remarkable American designer, Will H Dwiggins. Originally published in 1928, the re-issued 1947 version was almost unchanged and yet remained vibrant and eminently current. Dwiggins’ description of ‘modernism’ in the postscript to the book is striking for its tolerant and pragmatic tone at a time when the ‘modern spirit’ was still far from acceptable as a standard, even in America: ‘Actual modernism is a state of mind that says: ‘Let’s forget (for the sake of the experiment) about Aldus, and Baskerville, and William Morris […] and take these types and machines and see what we can do with them on our own. Now.’ The graphic results of this state of mind are extraordinary, often highly stimulating, sometimes deplorable. The game is worth the risk…’.
The notion that typography should be a process in which the result could be unpredictable would be given short shrift in Britain whilst the typographer remained so closely aligned with a staunchly pragmatic printing industry and where standards remained commensurate with long-standing and universal consensual practice. ‘Modernism’, Dwiggins had declared, ‘is a natural and wholesome reaction against an overdose of traditionalism’ and in 1948, some twenty years after the book had first been published, there were signs that typographers in Britain were also beginning to understand that typography could, indeed must, be more inclusive, more interesting – even inventive.
Whilst the majority of the printing industry could not understand, and certainly never condone a working process likened to an ‘experiment’ or a ‘game’, let alone one that contained ‘risk’, the designer, found that such attitudes were making the printing office a stifling place to work. If design was to become a ‘stimulating’ process, certainly one in which the status quo might be challenged, it was clear that it would need to function quite separately from the printing industry. When John Lewis left W S Cowell Ltd in 1951 Geoffrey Smith eventually reverted to printing’s 19th century norm by passing responsibility for design back to those compositors within the company ‘who showed an artistic bent’.
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The evolving status of specialised design as a profession in its own right was the driver for reform at the Royal College of Art during 1948 and aimed to be achieved by employing lecturers who were active practitioners rather than career academics. An admirable aim but one requiring the ability to recognise such a candidate.
Richard Guyatt was one of the original group of professors assembled by the new Principal, Robin Darwin, who placed him in charge of the Graphic Design Department: the first – after some controversy – to be so named in Britain. Guyatt later wrote, ‘the name graphic design was chosen. No one was quite sure what it meant, but it had a purposeful ring.’ Guyatt invited Lewis, a friend from their days at Charterhouse, to lunch in Soho and told him of his appointment. After Lewis had congratulated him Guyatt replied, ‘Yes, but the trouble is, I don’t know anything about the subject...’ Lewis’ solution was that Guyatt appoint John Brinkley; ‘a super chap’. The following week Brinkley was duly offered a contract by the RCA and two years later Lewis was invited to join him. The Lewis-Brinkley partnership, established five years previous at Cowell’s, was now re-formed at the RCA and was immediately commissioned by Herbert Read, on behalf of the publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul, to ‘do a book’ that explained the curious, new, and aberrant subject; Graphic Design.
Graphic Design: with Special Reference to Lettering, Typography and Illustration, was finally published in 1954. Its content rarely strayed far from ‘the book’ as a means of demonstrating the function and potential of typography and illustration. However, the book Lewis and Brinkley had in mind was a generic ideal, one in which the inherent etiquette of the page – continuous text composed on a central axis – could be applied without further discrimination. Guidebooks, maintenance manuals, catalogues, recipe books, timetables etc. were all too wayward to fit the Lewis/Brinkley monocratic syllabus.
The late arrival of their book – some thought thirty years late – made it part of a poignant last hurrah for ‘new traditionalism’ as the influence of its main protagonists dissipated. Beatrice Warde, Monotype’s promotions officer, and vociferous supporter of the print reform championed by ‘new traditionalism’, argued for ‘discipline and humility’ in her essay The Crystal Goblet (published in 1955 but first delivered as a lecture, titled ‘Printing should be invisible’ in 1930). Of Simon, Meynell, and Morison; the three who best epitomised and practiced the reforms Warde described it was Simon, the humblest and least political of the group, who remained most influential into the 1950s until his sudden death in 1956. Having taken over as Director of the Curwen Press on Harold Curwen’s retirement in 1940, he helped recruit Jan Tschichold for Allen Lane at Penguin Books in 1947 and, the same year, brought Hans Schmoller to the Curwen Press to take over his own pre-war role as typographic designer. Simon’s journal, Signature, continued until 1954. Meynell was given a knighthood in 1946 but quickly withdrew from his position at hmso to concentrate on the Nonesuch Press and other business matters.
Morison declined the offer of a knighthood and was preoccupied with research during the 1950s and, despite continuing his association with Monotype and the Cambridge University Press, effectively withdrew from the practical world of type and typography. In 1957, Morison delivered his final Lyell Lecture at Oxford in which he declared that the book typographer’s acceptance of ‘universal consensus – the result of a twenty-five century process of evolution’ remained unequivocally, ‘the best guarantee against experiment or innovation or irresponsibility’. However, typographers had already freed themselves from the restraint of ‘universal consensus’. Not new but newly expressed, Herbert Spencer, doubtless with Morison in his sights, wrote on the opening page of the first issue of his journal Typographica in 1949, ‘We cannot equal the great typography of the past by imitation’, but ‘by having a definite objective in all our experiments […] we shall make our own real contribution to the development of the Art of Typography.’
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Lewis remained at the Royal College of Art until 1963 and left to edit an excellent series of soft-back books on design for Studio Vista. But most important was his pioneering Printed Ephemera: the changing uses of type and letterforms in English and American printing, published by Faber in 1962. This original and influential book arose from the chance discovery in an Ipswich bookshop of a large blank-book into which examples of jobbing printing had been pasted. Research into the origins of this material caused Lewis to build a significant collection of some 20,000 items of his own (now held by the University of Reading). Examples of sail-makers’ needle-packets are particularly well represented.