J H Mason, typography, and the artschool ethos

When I offered this article to the then-incumbent editor of TypoGraphic he gave it back saying it was too long and too serious (he probably meant 'boring' and ‘academic’). He obviously assumed the ISTD members were as dim as him. I took over as editor a year later and gave my second issue (in 1998) the theme; Design Education to enable me to publish this article.

At the end of the nineteenth century the printing industry, the second largest industry in London at the time,1 was under tremendous competition from abroad,2 the failure of the apprenticeship system was forcing standards of workmanship down3 whilst the very nature of the printing process and its products was undergoing radical changes.4 In 1896, the Technical Education Board of the London County Council was able to report that: ‘A Central School of Arts and Crafts had been set up fill certain unoccupied spaces in the field of education’. Even so, it was a further nine years before printing was included in the curriculum. 

W. R. Lethaby was considered to be the natural choice for the job as principal. Emery Walker and Sir Sidney Cockerell persuaded him to put his name forward, and testimonials were obtained from, among others, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Lethaby had worked for many years as a successful architect, was profoundly influenced by William Morris, and had worked with Morris for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings alongside other champions of the Arts and Crafts Movement. 

Art schools in the 1890s  tended to be rather dilettante institutions with little or no vocational bias to their work or purpose.5 Lethaby described them as ‘teaching how to swim without water’. Technical colleges, on the other hand, aimed to simulate industrial working practices and conditions, including the incorporation of inbred dogma.6 To establish the required balance of academia and training, Lethaby had the innovative idea of appointing only a small core of full-time teachers, whilst employing practising artists and designers on a part-time basis. An interdisciplinary approach to study was instigated as students were encouraged to ‘see how stained-glass windows are made, and books are bound and gilding done’.7 Students and teachers were expected to undertake ‘live’ projects which might be self-generated or commissions offered from outside the College. All of these were bold policies which gave Lethaby and the Central School of Arts and Crafts a growing, eventually world-wide, reputation; ideas absorbed and employed by, among others, Walter Gropius8 during his initial years as Director of the Bauhaus at Weimar. 

An unusual fact was that students in these early years, were not subjected to examinations, nor were certificates or diplomas awarded, it being considered sufficient to have a portfolio of work that demonstrated a student’s abilities – for better or worse. Lethaby did not conceal his distaste for the competitive nature of commerce and industry; ‘Education need not... be conceived as an introduction to the competitive scramble’.9 In 1905, some nine years after the Central School had opened, evening classes in printing were started at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and John Henry Mason, at the recommendation of Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, (who both served on the London County Council Consultative Committee to advise the Council on these subjects) was invited by Lethaby to be responsible for them. Mason thus became one of the very first teachers of typography in an art school. Walker and Cobden-Sanderson were eager to see the improved standards achieved by the private presses reflected in general trade printing. 

Mason was appointed to teach two evenings each week. The following entry appears in the 1906 prospectus: ‘Printing.10 A class will be established in typography under the direction of J H Mason on Mondays and Wednesdays from 7.00 to 9.30. This class, which is intended solely for apprentices and journeymen actually engaged in the trade, aims at supplying instruction in the highest type of bookwork to the exclusion of mere advertisements, trade cards etc. It is felt that given the recent revival in printing, the establishment of such a class, which would cooperate with the classes in bookbinding, lettering, black and white design, etc to form a complete school of book production, should do great service to the craft generally’. 

Trade union pressure had made the proviso concerning sole entry to the course by apprentices and journeymen essential but that bar would be dropped by 1916. The statement ‘...exclusion of mere advertisements and trade cards’ is interesting because it clearly reflects Mason’s contempt for an activity within the printing trade that was growing at enormous speed. By the end of the century, jobbing-work represented by far the largest part of all the printing industry’s output. The rich range of new typefaces, or ‘freak types’ as some called them,11 created for the jobbing printer, was proof of the considerable commercial growth of this area. 

The term ‘jobbing-work’ described anything other than bookwork; all forms of advertising and other promotional material such as posters, leaflets, programmes, tickets, catalogues, and, of course, magazines and newspapers. As the term implies, jobbing-work had always been considered to be of a ‘lower order’ to book-work, but as the use of advertising and related promotional items became more widespread, so the demand increased. Unlike bookwork, where a clearly defined dogma existed, jobbing work had no precedent and, to be effective, required all the traditional typographic skills plus a flexibility in the application of those skills. Jobbing work existed to demand attention and, therefore, to work effectively needed to extend typographic norms and language. Nothing in the traditional training scheme prepared the young print apprentice for such work. Besides, the general attitude among printers, as employers and employees, was that such material was handled under sufferance. Real printing still meant books and, if it wasn’t a book, the same rules were applied regardless!12. Mason’s refusal to incorporate such activities into his course is understandable given that the aims of both Mason and Lethaby were to lift the standards of the printing trade to that of the private presses, but it also displayed a lack of understanding of the broader state of the printing trade at that time or the direction it was inevitably taking. 

Mason’s experience of the general printing trade was limited to his years at the Ballantyne Press in Covent Garden where he was an apprentice compositor from the age of thirteen. This appointment was to prove important because the Ballantyne Press was not a specialist publisher-printer, but still printed a lot of bookwork. Of special interest to Mason was Ballantyne’s links with Charles Ricketts, a follower of William Morris and founder of The Vale Press. From 1895, Ballantyne reserved a press and pressman to work exclusively on the Vale Press books under the direct supervision of Ricketts. To Mason this proved that ‘fine’ work could be produced by an established ‘trade’ printer to the demanding standards of a private press. Mason’s employment was abruptly ended by a fire which destroyed the Ballantyne Press in 1900, but after a short break, Mason was recommended to T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, who, with Emery Walker, appointed him to work at the newly formed Doves Press. Mason found working at The Doves Press quite a culture-shock; ‘This is a new and beautiful world after commercial work...’ although, significantly, working at the Ballantyne Press had been far from the ‘competitive scramble’ of a typical printing office of the time. 

The Doves Press continued until 1916, but Mason had moved on to a new sphere of work at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1909 when Lethaby offered him the opportunity to join the full-time staff and to organise day classes in printing. The ‘Day Technical School of Book Production’ began with the clear intention of utilising Mason’s knowledge drawn from his practical experience of working at a private press. The School was open to boys awarded scholarships plus a certain number of free admissions, as an alternative to normal secondary school. The first year was divided between printing, bookbinding, and academic work which had a bias towards the needs of young printers. The next two years were devoted to printing or bookbinding and more advanced academic work. Drawing, lettering, design for bookbinder, and wood-engraving were taught throughout the three years; ‘...forming elements of a broadening culture’. 

Mason explained the benefits of the Day Technical School in the first issue of The Imprint, 1913; ‘The general education of the boy is not arrested at fourteen, but is concentrated more or less onto the work which he is taking up for life. Further, the habits of discipline which have been inculcated with untold labour in the elementary school are in the case of these boys further strengthened in the technical school: so that when the boy leaves at sixteen there is a strong reason to hope that they may be among the permanent lines of his character’. 

After three years spent at the School, the boys would be apprenticed for five years in the regular way and become journeymen normally at twenty-one. These classes found favour with, as Mason put it, ‘enlightened companies’ such as the St Clement’s Press and the Baynard Press, who began taking the majority of their apprentices from the school as the trade unions allowed the concept of time spent at technical school to form part of the apprenticeship scheme. 

Of his approach to teaching and learning Mason wrote: ‘First, my aim was educative in a wide sense as industrial specialisation had had the result of giving the printer a minor part in the work as a whole...(13) To meet this I aimed at giving the young student a complete framework of knowledge of his trade, into which the content of his later experience could be placed with a sense of its place in the whole order of the trade. Secondly (or simultaneously) I wished to give him a love for, and a delight in, his trade as a means of self-expression as a mode of life and as a joyous activity, and this was closely linked to my third aim which was workmanship, and the sense of satisfaction resulting from mastery and conscientious work’. 

Mason’s approach to education was student-centred; instill the need to know and the student will be motivated to do the rest. Put into an industrial context, Mason explained it thus; ‘The printer’s need of verification will lead him to history and literature. Art and aesthetics will open broad and attractive fields before the youth who is interested in illustration. The inevitable interest in kindred or ancillary trades and activities will widen his range still further, and from the relations he will trace everywhere between the special activities in his own trade and that trade as a whole with other trades, will open the study of political economy – the chain is unbroken, it leads to ethics and philosophy. A trade is, or should be, the true university’. 

This philosophy emanating from the Central School of Arts and Crafts had many admirers, particularly abroad, but in the UK it also had its critics. Complaints usually concerned inadequate training with modern technology and the absence of realistic working methods. But some, surprisingly even from within education itself, considered the time and effort spent on ‘aesthetic issues’ a waste of time. J. R. Riddell, principal at the London School of Printing, wrote in the Monotype Recorder, 1928; ‘Some of those associated with art schools...have contended that if the prospective printer were thoroughly trained in aesthetic principles a higher standard of printing would be produced...a claim unsubstantiated. Whilst the printer must, of necessity, have some knowledge of the proportions, balance and the most suitable type for the job, in this mechanical age his work may be said to be more scientific than of an artistic character’. Riddell continues: ‘Best results... will come speedily if those engaged in the industry will insist that the courses of instruction in the schools be so arranged that they meet the needs of the craft, and do not blindly comply with the views of “visionaries,” who may be genuinely interested in education, but do not understand what is required in a modern printing office’.(14) This view was shared by many in the trade and was fuelled perhaps, by Mason’s criticisms of commercial printing standards in The Imprint. 

The first issue of The Imprint was published In January 1913. Mason, along with Gerard Meynell, a pioneer in the revival of printing, and two of Mason’s colleagues from the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Edward Johnston, who taught calligraphy, and F. E. Jackson, who taught lithography, shared the role of editor of this new monthly typographic journal. It was aimed principally at the trade, with the offer of genuine exchanges of knowledge and experience within its pages. Mason certainly made full use of The Imprint as a mouth-piece; his critical views of the typographic skills and working practices of the contemporary printing trade became a regular feature and he was never less than brutally frank. In his review of The Mask, a quarterly journal of the Art of the Theatre, Mason, having criticised the choice of type, the layout and poor press work concludes, ‘The whole thing typographically looks to me like the untrained piecemeal conception of the amateur printer. I haven’t the patience to go over it in detail; for there is a matter of excellent printing, and it drives me wild to see it fooled about in this way’. On the use of type itself, Mason gave the following critique of The American Printer; ‘So printers and advertisers aren’t content to use print as God Almighty meant it to be used – quietly and honestly – but strain the beautiful instrument into discordant forms that repel all finer minds, and bring the craft into contempt. What regard or dignity has the printer nowadays? The craft has become an industry, and the industry one of the least esteemed’. 

His criticism did not always go unanswered although Mason’s resolve remained absolute. His review of The Fellowship Books; ‘A rather pretty series of priggish little books...’, goes on to say ‘these books...might have passed with a stream of pretty pettiness’, except that on page ten of the prospectus there was a claim of, ‘excellence in format’ by the publisher. This was too much for Mason who tore into his subject with characteristic venom. James Guthrie, the publisher in question, complained that the reviewer was not prepared to make any allowance for the necessary creative thinking that a new task brings, and that he was denying the existence of new and significant printing, the result of which would be to relegate design forever in the past. A reasonable response perhaps, to which Mason replied; ‘I don’t deny (new and significant printing), but I deny that it’s good...and if it’s significant, it is significant generally of bad taste and want of knowledge, or worse’. The industry he describes is that in which he was preparing his young students. Little wonder that Mason advised those who showed promise to go into education rather than the printing trade. 

It will be no surprise to learn that Mason, unsympathetic, and becoming progressively more hostile to the printing trade, was more successful at preparing boys for a career in education rather than industry. Owens describes how outstanding students, Leonard Jay15 and Charles L Pickering16 to name but two, would be singled out to take up teaching posts, as many colleges sought Mason’s guidance and help in recruiting their teachers.17 To Mason’s mind, his best students would be wasted by an industry where there was little opportunity for the intelligent student to fulfil his potential. Mason’s earlier, idealistic view of the print industry being ‘a true university’ had been short-lived. According to Owens, Mason’s students were aware of the new typography coming out of Germany. Mason himself worked, both before and after the First World War, at the Cranach Press in Weimar, Germany. So it is certain he knew of Gropius and his work at the Bauhaus. In London, Bertram Evans gave a lecture on the Bauhaus at the Royal Society for the Arts and Charles Peignot had lectured on his new typefaces. Eric Gill had designed his Sans Serif to great acclaim, and had pioneered the use of ranged-left, ragged-right setting, at least in the UK. 

What Mason’s supporters might call his ‘highly disciplined approach’ others would describe as narrow-minded and singularly dogmatic. Anything conceived outside his ideological frame of reference was dismissed with absolute contempt; ‘We are quite satisfied that oblong books are not desirable.’ Mason saw himself as the defender of Typography against the threat of falling standards of workmanship caused by the mechanisation of a printing process offering little opportunity, in his view, for the printer to practice his craft. Alternatively, Gropius, after initially experimenting with ideas similar to those pioneered at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, went onto take the opposite view, and the Bauhaus, famously, embraced technological progress and all forms of mechanisation into the design process. 

I can find no reference by Mason concerning his views of the Bauhaus, but Mason’s friend and colleague, Stanley Morrison,18 complained that the Bauhaus was; ‘...making an art out of something that should be a service, violating tradition, convention, orthodoxy’. Doubtless Mason would agree since he also believed the typographer was in the service of type, its history and the great names who created it. The upholding of standards meant that there could be no deviation from the methodology incorporated by the ‘classic’ works and that to deviate would let down ‘typography’. No doubt to Mason, the Bauhaus experiments had not the remotest connection to typography as he understood the term. 

After Lethaby’s move, in 1909, to the Royal College of Art as Head of Design19 his teaching ideals, so successfully implemented at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, came under attack from the members of the 1910 Departmental Committee, established to report on the function and constitution of the RCA and its relations to schools of art in England. It had been noted that RCA design students had, over a considerable period, been virtually unemployable as designers.20 It was no surprise21 when the committee had completed its deliberations it reported of ‘... detailed criticisms which have reached us... it is maintained that (Lethaby’s students) spend too much time in making imitative studies in the museum and then acquiring a “stock-in-trade” of motifs for future use; and, as a corollary, that their exercises in inventive design lack originality and are pieced together from the models they have reproduced. In so far as they receive a definite artistic bent, it is described as “medieval”.’ In 1918, Lethaby was ‘retired’ on the advice of the board of education at the age of sixty-one. The usual expressions of regret are absent from the RCA’s files but at least the students in the Design School clubbed together to buy him a farewell gift – a bicycle. 

The latter years of Mason’s teaching career, however, were marked by a national recognition of his services to education and to printing. In 1936 Mason was named as one of ten Royal Designers for Industry, (Eric Gill was another recipient). Mason’s distrust of Modernism was not just tolerated but revered. It should be remembered that the thirties were a time of mounting national concern about political events taking place in Europe, and a period for reflection of all things British was, perhaps a natural reaction. National identity required a boost and was achieved by scouring the past. Mason’s stand for the status quo was now perceived as heroic.22 

The Hambledon Report on Advanced Art Education in London, 1936, was also complimentary of Mason and the work emanating from the Central; ‘...this large and highly successful institution, with its reputation and the excellence of its teaching attracts students from a wide area...its highest branches perform work more appropriate to a national than to a local institution...’. 

In fact the Central was held in such esteem that the Hambledon committee considered the possibility of it amalgamating with, or even superseding, the Royal College of Art as the National Institute for the advanced study of applied art. It was in 1940, after the Central School had already been evacuated to Newbury, that Mason decided to retire; ‘...I gave up printing mainly because of my sight; but partly because of the economy regulations which precludes good design’. After the war, he returned to Putney. He died in 1951 at the age of 75. 

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, mass communication became a reality. Multinational companies needed to communicate in so many ways to so many people that an infinitely more flexible approach to solving design problems was recognised as a priority. The new situation was addressed by a major restructuring of Higher Education provision which took place in the late forties to ‘Get Britain Moving’. Design for print, now called ‘graphic design’, was to be taught as a subject quite separate from the print process, and there were not many, on either side, who were sorry to see the split. The symbiosis of the design and printing processes that Mason had nurtured had come to a very abrupt end. 

Printing schools took the view that their work was science and technology based. Graphic design courses, now housed within fully fledged art schools, and liberated from direct links with the printing industry, took a very different approach. Here, design students looked towards European ideologies of which they had been starved prior to the war.23 Whilst links with printing departments were maintained, to provide a ‘practical’ element to the design process, these tended to be rather difficult to implement. Old habits die hard, and printing departments did not like the idea of letting outsiders into the print rooms,24 particularly ‘art’ students, ‘flashy little stylists’,25 who would, eventually, be in the market for clients who had previously been exclusive to the printer. Not surprisingly, art students exhibited certain feelings of antagonism, even suspicion towards the printing department, often to the point of suspecting sabotage whenever the finished printed job did not come back the way it had been planned.26 

The stratification of design and print had been implemented quickly and thoroughly. James Holland, in 1955, described the situation like this: ‘It is doubtful if any country has built up a more comprehensive structure for art and design education, at greater expense, than Britain. There is a real danger, however, that in the stratification of further education, the planning and creative skills, allocated to one level, may become unreasonably detached from the implementing techniques, which in their own way are no less demanding of skill and understanding yet are relegated to lower-level institutions with few links with creative design studies... So a situation has arisen in which the graphic design student may be edged into academic isolationism, while his printing counterpart tends increasingly to become a machine minder...’27 As Beatrice Warde wrote at the time, the printer had become the hod-carrier, and the designer, that ‘flashy little stylist’, the architect.28