TYPOGRAPHICA 16
First Series 1959
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 16. London: Lund Humphries, 1959. First edition [Original Series]. Slim quarto. Plain wrappers with printed dust jacket attached to spine [as issued]. 44 pp. Multiple paper stocks and elaborate graphic design throughout. Wraparound jacket design by Franco Grignani. 3-D gasses in glassine envelope [as issued]. Jacket spine chipped with some loss, but a very good copy.
9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 44 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:
- Cover Design by Franco Grignani
- Modern Hebrew Typefaces by Henri Friedlander
- Capitals, twins and multi-print by Professor G. Van Den Bergh. includes 3-D green/red paper spectacles in original glassine envelope.
- El Lissitzky: Typographer by Camilla Gray: 14 pages with 30 black and white examples
- A History of Book Illustration review by Paul Hogarth
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Spencer was a reformer dedicated to improving standards of design in a field dominated by the printing industry's outdated conventions.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.