TYPOGRAPHICA 10
First Series, 1955
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 10. London: Lund Humphries,1955. First edition [Original Series]. Slim quarto. Plain wrappers with printed dust jacket attached to spine [as issued]. 36 pp. Multiple paper stocks and elaborate graphic design throughout. Jacket spine heel chipped, but a very good or better copy.
9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 36 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 a Karl Appel catalogue cover on Oatmeal Stock bound in.
Contents for this original 1955 issue:
- Stedelijk Museum Catalogues by Herbert Spencer. Willem Sandberg cover designs including a bound-in Karl Appel catalog cover on Oatmeal Stock.
- The Training of Typographers by Geoffrey Dowding
- Books for Typographers: a list of books published in 1953-54
- Contemporary Art Society Invitation Cards and programmesDesigns by William Bradbery.
- French Lithographic illustrations by W. J. Strachan. Images by Derain, Matisse, Lurçat, and Goerg.
Typographica was the brainchild of founder, editor, designer and renowned typographer Herbert Spencer (Great Britain, 1924 – 2002), 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Spencer was a reformer dedicated to improving standards of design in a field dominated by the printing industry's outdated conventions.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.