TYPOGRAPHICA 10
New Series 1964
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 10. London: Lund Humphries, December 1964. First edition [New Series]. Slim quarto. Printed thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 64 pp. Elaborately illustrated text and advertisements printed on multiple paper stocks. 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. Orange jacket lightly sun darkened, otherwise a nearly fine copy.
8.25 x 10.75 magazine with 64 pages printed on a variety of paper stocks. Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography. Paper stocks include matte and uncoated
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.
- Newspaper Seals by Alan Hutt
- The Compass Rose by W.E. May
- The Emergence of the Printer's Stock Block by Charles Hasler
- Sex and Typography by Robert Brownjohn
"For some reason (probably clear to a psychiatrist) four design projects in which I have recently been involved have all had a strong emphasis on sex in the form of the female anatomy."
Robert Brownjohn wrote in his article 'Sex and Typography,' that the idea sprang directly from his 'disordered' mind and he described the composition as an integration of sex, typography and meaning. A perfect encapsulation of an experience that can be described as 'simultaneity,' in other words seeing and reading, both at once.
"In the last 15 years, in typography the real advance has been the use of type not as an adjunct to an illustration or photo, but in its use as the image itself."
Born in 1925 in New Jersey, Brownjohn was fortunate enough to be taught by Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design in Chicago from 1944-46. This auspicious meeting saw Brownjohn develop an interest in product design, with Moholy-Nagy offering the young designer his Parker Pen account. Less propitious was the fact that while Brownjohn was in Chicago he developed a serious heroin addiction that would haunt him for the remainder of his life and eventually bring about his premature death at the age of 44 in 1970.
After Chicago, Brownjohn made the journey to New York, working as a freelancer for such clients as George Nelson. New York of the 1950s appeared to have been the ideal setting for Brownjohn’s larger-than-life persona. Mixing with musicians such as Stan Getz and Charlie Parker, his creative appetite gave rise to a graphic idiom that combined the Modernist teachings he had received in Chicago with a broader appreciation for the vernacular graphics of the street. It was this synthesis of forms, together with a rising demand for graphic design in affluent postwar America, that gave rise to Brownjohn forming a design agency with Ivan Chermayeff. For such a talented duo it was relatively easy pickings, as Chermayeff noted: ‘We went into business together because there was something to be done in graphic design and not so many people to do it. It was not that there was no competition, but there was an opportunity. If you took your portfolio to a publishing company, you could get some work, more or less.’ This partnership was soon expanded to three with the arrival of Tom Geismar to become BCG Associates.
While Brownjohn’s design work prospered, unfortunately so had his addiction to heroin. In 1960, he made the decision to move to London with his wife and daughter. The grounds for this relocation was that the British government had decriminalised the use of heroin, and, with an eye to withdrawal, addicts were supplied by their general physician. This aside, Brownjohn had a flair for being in the right place at the right time, and his arrival in London came at a moment when the city seemed alive with possibility. As the illustrator Angela Landels recalled, ‘There was a fabulous kind of rustle, a murmur that ran through the town, the people, the air, the climate, everything!’
Shortly after arriving, Brownjohn was quickly hired to head up the London branch of the American firm J. Walter Thompson. He held this post for two years before he quit for the position of creative director at McCann Erickson. It was from McCann Erickson that he freelanced and produced his justly celebrated sequences for From Russia With Love and later Goldfinger. [Kerry Williams Purcell]
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.