Type case illuminations

Crispin and Jan Elsted, proprietors of the Barbarian Press in Canada, purchased and shipped a large and important collection of Curwen Press letterpress border material from Ian Mortimer in London in 2007. As a result, a book titled Bordering on the Sublime was planned (and as I write is still in production) and  I was asked to write about the time and place in which Harold Curwen worked. The following, written for Baseline, came out of the research. 

The decades both before and after 1900 saw significant numbers of art school graduates leaving college intent on a career in print media, most as illustrators but some had broader aspirations. A few art schools offered practical typography and something akin to commercial printing processes, but if an aspiring designer could not gain such first-hand knowledge then an additional period of study on a printing course would be necessary. 

The letterpress print trade was strictly unionised and fiercely protective of its methods and processes and was not, generally, intent on being helpful to outsiders. A close friend or, better still, a family connection, was often the only way in. Nevertheless, for designers of print, it was often the allure of ink, paper and press, and a genuine fascination for its tools and processes that had initially drawn them to the subject. But with entry to the commercial printing industry generally barred, for many their aim was to set themselves up as printers as well as designers with their own workshops. In this way they could work unrestricted by the whims or predilections of the commercial printer. (The printer would often describe the designer’s methods in the same terms.) 

Designing printed matter was still a new concept for the general public because printers had previously included this as an integral part of their service. Therefore, a designer of print who could demonstrate craft skills and maintain the cultural references of the printer had a commercial as well as a creative advantage. Naturally, this invasion of the printer’s territory further alienated the designer from a print trade who considered him, to put it mildly, naîve. Such estrangement would, no doubt, be considered a badge of honour for the designer. Celebrated examples include the American designer William H Bradley, who set up his Wayside Press in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1895, Daniel Berkeley Updike his Merrymount Press in 1896 and Frederic Goudy his Village Press in 1903. 

There were also a few highly influential examples of printing companies recruiting designers. Most notable was Houghton Mifflin in Boston, North America, which established a separate subsidiary workshop in 1903 for their Riverside Press1 where the design and production of finely printed, limited edition books was undertaken with the young designer Bruce Rogers at its head. Rogers’s work encouraged developments in England, notably Francis Meynell’s Nonesuch Press and Harold Curwen and Oliver Simon at the Curwen Press. In every case, the designer had first-hand knowledge of printing and maintained intimate contact with the materials and the processes. 

For this generation of designers, there was a fervent desire for change, which became all the more potent after the First World War. The overt complexity of the work produced by the Artistic Printing movement (from around 1880 to 1900)2 incorporating material typified by the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry, was now dismissed as vain and nonsensical. William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, set up in part in protest at the state of British printing, had garnered universal respect, but now appeared increasingly remote, even to its admirers. His critics were vociferous, describing his books as ‘dull and stupidly serious’.3 Le Corbusier best summed up the modern spirit, ‘No more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanliness’. 

Yet, despite the call for simplicity and clarity, the first three decades of the twentieth century were a golden age for display types and ornamental material. However, unlike the 19th century when typefaces were designed anonymously by in-house staff, type foundries were now commissioning new typefaces from artists of repute working outside the printing and typefounding industries and credited for their work. (The term ‘designer’ was not commonly used until later). This new material was specifically designed to meet the needs of a maturing advertising industry and its simplicity of form: often consisting of strong characterful sans serif types – also referred to as ‘geometric’ – which were supported by ornaments, traditionally called ‘flowers’ or ‘fleurons’, 4 consisting of squares, circles, triangles and portions thereof. This decorative material – albeit in these new, more utilitarian forms – might be the building blocks with which to create a pristine, profoundly undecorated ideal, is not without irony. But when the Bauhaus began to incorporate the square, circle and triangle into its printed matter, for example, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s symbol for the Bauhaus Press in 1923, these elemental forms, described as the fundamental grammar of visual communication, also became a common sight in German foundry specimen catalogues. 

The international trade in foundry type ensured that this promotional material was also seen in North America. The combination of simple shapes and especially the use of primary colours (another Bauhaus-led innovation) marked a conspicuous transformation. Because these shapes were being discussed as being the building blocks of visual grammar it is not surprising that designers and compositors alike began to use them to construct images and letterforms rather than as decorative material as initially intended. The method of their making, by default, edited out specified information to leave what might be described as the essence of the issue in hand. For the Bauhaus this was about rationality, functionality and a new objectivity. 

Away from the Bauhaus the more playful aspect of building blocks would not be ignored. The use of these rudimental shapes as an integral part of the design process was discussed and illustrated in The American Printer, (December 1927) in an article by Albert Schiller, at that time Art Director of the Advertising Agencies’ Service in New York, ‘...Besides using [typographic ornaments] for illustrations, [German industrialists] have their trademarks designed in this manner, and even students in their trade schools are encouraged to study this ingenious art. For an art it surely is, and needless to say, a direct outgrowth of the German trend toward modernistic expression in design.’ 

In the same article Schiller emphasises that it was designers who were choosing to use typographic ornaments in this way rather than printers, ‘I must confess that the majority of printers will miss completely the artistic significance of the result as a “drawing” or design. Their bewilderment will come in when they try to decipher too literally the various elements that make up the whole’. As Schiller intimates, the best examples of typographic pictures are those that do not allude to literary intent. Buildings might be a particularly suitable (and predictable) subject, but the most interesting work was that which caused the decorative ornaments themselves to disappear beneath the power of finished image or design. Only the best of Schiller’s work achieves this, although it could be argued that he did more than most to promote the use of typographic ornaments for image making.

 In 1952 an exhibition of his work was held at the New York Public Library called ‘Machine-Age Art by Albert Schiller’ in which, as well as displaying pictures on the walls, also included larger scale work on the floor, ‘formed by placing together mosaic tiles of various size, colour and texture’.5 This exhibition was followed by a selection of Schiller’s work being reproduced in Design and Paper (number 36) the journal of the paper-maker Marquardt & Company Inc. which Schiller dedicated to ‘King Bruce of Typolandia’, a curious reference to Bruce Rogers. It is doubtful Rogers would have been amused. 

Other significant designers who produced work using typographic ornaments were all German, including Ernst Aufseeser (who was also a Professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, one of several excellent arts and crafts schools overshadowed by the Bauhaus) plus Georg Goedecker, Wilhelm 
Warner, and Hans Schleger (better known as ‘Zero’) who worked for most of his life in London producing work commissioned by London Underground and the General Post Office among others. For all these designers, their work with typographic ornaments has been largely eclipsed by an expansive body of work. 

In this they have something in common with another designer, Alvin Lustig in America, who, more than anyone else, used typographic ornaments to champion Modernist design culture. From the start, Lustig (1915 – 1955) like his many predecessors, aimed to set up his own printing and design business from which he could work in his own way, in his own time, and perhaps teach other designers letterpress printing. With this in mind, Lustig attended printing classes run by the fine press printer Richard Hoffman in 1933, followed by a year at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. After several inauspicious starts, he was offered a corner in Ward Richie’s print and publishing company with sufficient space for a desk and his accumulated cases of metal type and ornaments. He called his ‘studio’ The Media Press. 

In exchange for the working space and use of a proofing press, Lustig designed material for Richie as and when required. One of the first Media Press items was a specimen sheet to promote his services and, rather boldly, explained his approach to design: ‘From these basic, standard, typographic shapes all the designs shown are constructed, no cuts or drawings being used.’6 Lustig transformed ‘typographic pictures’ into a highly refined and personal method of working. He began designing book jackets in the late 1930s, but his best – the ‘heroic type pictures’ – were designed for Ward Richie and then for James Laughlin’s New Directions Books which was committed to publishing the work of Modernist writers. An abundance of other material, including catalogue and prospectus covers, newsletters, advertising, announcements, greeting cards as well as being the basis of trademarks and logos, demonstrates Lustig’s commitment, especially in his formative years, to this medium. 

There is a perception that assembling these typographic pictures must be very time-consuming, but this is not, necessarily, the case. It is certainly no slower than producing the equivalent as ‘camera-ready’ artwork using ink and a ruling pen. It is also, almost inevitably, more accurate. So once proficient, it can be an extremely efficient as well as a precise and effective medium. Lustig’s growing confidence is reflected in the fluidity and variability of his work. He never gave this method of working a name, but Steven Heller recently described it as ‘type case illumination’. 7 One of the reasons Lustig’s work with typographic ornament is so remarkable is that it was essentially non-figurative. Repeated squares might be reminiscent of a skyscraper, or a series of horizontal lines a speeding train – Lustig was surely mindful of such connections, after all, he was devoted to Modern aesthetics – but he quite purposely kept open the possibility of alternative interpretations. Other, less overt references must be deciphered. It is a game worth playing, and one of which Lustig approved.