TYPOGRAPHICA 9
New Series, June 1964
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 9. London: Lund Humphries, June 1964. First edition [New Series]. 8vo. Perfect bound and stitched printed wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 64 pp. Illustrated articles and period trade advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. 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. Spine slightly darkened. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.25 x 10.75 magazine with 64 pages printed on a wide variety of stocks. Highlights of this issue include two illustrated articles on Polish Avant-Garde Graphics between the Wars by the Formist poet Anatol Stern and an extremely early assessment of the graphic work of Henryk Berlewi by Eckhard Neumann. Highly recommended. Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography.
- Avant-Garde Graphics in Poland between the two World Wars by Anatol Stern: featuring futurist and constructivist work by Anatol Stern, Henryk Berlewi and others. Very cool indeed.
- Henryk Berlewi by Eckhard Neumann
- Sunday Photographers by Michael Middleton
- Crowns by Camilla Gray
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Spencer was a reformer dedicated to improving standards of design in a field dominated by the printing industry's outdated conventions.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.