TYPOGRAPHICA 3
New Series June 1961
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 3. London: Lund Humphries, June 1961. First edition [New Series]. 8vo. Perfect bound and stitched printed wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 75 pp. Illustrated articles and period trade advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Cover designs by Diter Rot. Spencer's legendary experimental typographic journal is coveted by multiple constituencies since Spencer vocally championed emerging trends such as Concrete Poetry, Semiotics and avant-garde Book Design. Uncoated orange jacket with inevitable mild soiling, but a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 76 pages printed on a variety of paper stocks. Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography. Paper stocks include matte and uncoated. Custom Binding includes several fold-outs and a bound-in sample of Diter Rot's Ideograms.
- Typophoto Ken Garland. New Swiss work samples by Karl Gerstner, Marcel Wyss, Siegfried Odermatt, and Armin Hofmann.
- The Books of Dieter Rot by Richard Hamilton (ephemera)
- National Zeitung (ephemera)
- The Drawings of Alcopley by Herbert Spencer
- From Painting to Photography: Experiments of the 1920's by Camilla Gray
Dieter Rot’s wildly inventive artistic practice encompassed everything from painting and sculpture to film and video, but it is, arguably, through his editioned works— books, prints, and multiples— that he made his most important contributions. These experimental editions include literature sausages, filled with ground-up books, newspapers, or magazines in place of meat; prints made with pudding, fruit juice, and other organic materials in lieu of ink; plastic toys mired in chocolate; and a dazzling array of variations on printed postcards.
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.