TYPOGRAPHICA 9
First Series 1954
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor] : TYPOGRAPHICA 9. London: Lund Humphries,1954. First edition [Original Series]. A near-fine perfect-bound magazine in stiff printed wrappers with a very good or better uncoated (fragile) dustjacket of colored stock printed in two colors: mild wear to the spine and edges. Here is a rare opportunity for Graphic Design/modern typography aficionados to own an original edition of the legendary Typographica magazine. If you're reading this, you probably know that issues of this groundbreaking magazine never surface on the open market.
9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 40 pages printed on a variety of paper stocks. Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography. Paper stocks include matte and uncoated.
- Publishers Colophones by Michael Alexander
- The machine-set advertisment by Alan Dodson
- Pattern, Sound and Motion: Central School Type Experiments
- The machine-set advertisment by Alan Dodson
- Recent Typography by Edward Wright
- Trends in Abstract painting in France by Herta Wescher
- Irish Bookbinding 1600-1800 (book Review) by William Mitchell
Typographica was the brainchild of founder, editor, designer and renowned typographer Herbert Spencer, and had a brief life, totalling 32 issues published between 1949 and 1967. But its influence stretched and stretches far beyond its modest distribution and print runs of the time. For many graphic designers, Typographica is something of an obsession, to be collected if and when found, savored, and poured over for designs, and techniques not seen since.
Spencer never intended to turn a profit, so no expenses were spared in production (just like Alexey Brodovitch's Portfolio). Different papers, letterpress, tip-ins, and more were all employed in the presentation of an eclectic range of subject matter: Braille, locomotive lettering, sex and typography, typewriter faces, street lettering, matches, and avant-garde poetry all found their way into the magazine.
Urbane, prolific and unfailingly modest, Spencer was a reformer dedicated to improving standards of design in a field dominated by the printing industry's outdated conventions. But he was also an aesthete with a connoisseur's eye for the wild modernist innovations with letterforms and layout of the 1920s. Spencer launched the seminal publication, Typographica, in 1949, when he was 25, and edited, designed and sometimes wrote for it for 18 years. Equally at home publishing one of the first articles in Britain about concrete poetry (then an international phenomenon), or an illustrated study of the design challenges presented by Braille, he was a new kind of designer-editor, able to think both visually and verbally, and to fuse images and words in meaningful new relationships.