THE LIBERATED PAGE -- A TYPOGRAPHICA ANTHOLOGY
Herbert Spencer [Editor], Aaron Burns [Foreword]
Herbert Spencer [Editor], Aaron Burns [Foreword]: THE LIBERATED PAGE -- A TYPOGRAPHICA ANTHOLOGY. San Francisco: Bedford Press, 1987. First edition. Quarto. Black fabricoid cloth titled in silver. Printed dust jacket. Blue endpapers. 232 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white with occasional red spot coloring. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Jacket with closed tear to rear panel, other a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.25 x 10.75 book with 232 pages and hundreds of illustrations, reproduced in black-and-white with red spot color (most of the work reproduced in this book was originally produced in these colors). It is printed on matte-coated paper. This book is an anthology of major typographic articles and experiments of this century as recorded in Typographica magazine -- published from 1949 to 1967 by Lund Humphries in London. The subject matter of these articles is avant-garde graphic design and typography, ranging roughly from the mid-1910s to the 1950s. Many of the artists in this book were associated with notable art movements of those years, including futurism, dada, surrealism, de stijl, and Russian constructivism. An excellent resource.
Contents:
- Foreword by Aaron Burns
- Robert Massin by Germano Facetti
- Josua Reichert: typography as visual poetry by Jasia Reichardt
- The Books of Diter Rot by Richard Hamilton
- BCG: The work of Brown, Chermayeff, and Geismar
- Idéogrammes lyriques (discusses Guillaume Apollinaire) by Stefan Themerson
- Paul Van Ostaijen by Edward Wright
- Lyric Poetry - Instructions for Use by Paul Vincent
- Richard Hamilton's version of 'The Green Box' (discusses Marcel Duchamp) by Edward Wright
- From Painting to Photography: Experiments of the 1920s (includes Raoul Hausmann, El Lissitzky, Man Ray) by Camilla Gray
- Avant-garde graphics in Poland between the two world wars by Anatol Stern
- Henryk Berlewi and Mechano-Faktura by Eckhard Neumann
- Piet Zwart by Herbert Spencer
- Paul Schuitema by Benno Wissing
- John Heartfield by Eckhard Neumann
- Alexander Rodchenko: A constructivist designer by Camilla Gray
- Herbert Bayer's photographic experiments by Eckhard Neumann
- Kurt Schwitters on a time chart by Stefan Themerson
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.