TYPOGRAPHICA 13
First Series, 1957
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 13. London: Lund Humphries, 1957. First edition [Original Series]. Slim quarto. Plain wrappers with printed dust jacket attached to spine [as issued]. 40 pp. Multiple paper stocks and elaborate graphic design throughout. Upper corner pushed and faintly creased throughout textblock. Jacket spine heel chipped, but a very good copy.
9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 40 pages printed on a variety of paper stocks. Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography. Paper stocks include matte and uncoated.
Contents:
- French Book Clubs by Germano Facetti
- Factors in the Choices of TypefacesReviewed by Stewart F. Hayes
- Locomotive Lettering by Patricia Davey
- The Arrow in the Road by Edward Wright
- The Illustrations of Avigdor Arikha by Alain Bosquet
- Books for Typographers
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Spencer was a reformer dedicated to improving standards of design in a field dominated by the printing industry's outdated conventions.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.