TYPOGRAPHICA 8
New Series, December 1963
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 8. London: Lund Humphries, December 1963. First edition [New Series]. Slim quarto. Printed thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 70 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. Yellow jacket lightly sunned and soiled, otherwise a nearly fine copy.
8.25 x 10.75 magazine with 70 pages printed on a wide variety of stocks. Highlights of this issue include two illustrated articles on Concrete Poetry (with examples by Ian Finley Hamilton and Josua Reichert) and an extremely early assessment of the graphic work of Holland designer and filmmaker Paul Schuitema. Highly recommended.
Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography. . Inks include both spot colors and metallics. Custom Binding includes a 30-inch, 3-color gatefold and Joshua Reichert's concrete poetry printed in letterpress.
- Josua Reichert: typography as visual poetry by Jasia Reichert
- Chance by Barbara Jones, with 17 photographs by Herbert Spencer
- Art and Writing ( an exhibition review) by Nicolete Gray
- The Visual Craft of William Golden (review)
- A Rich Man's Guide to Bingo by Anthony Clift (fold-out pages)
- Paul Schuitema by Benno Wissing (12 pages with many 2-color reproductions)
- Concrete Poetry and Ian Hamilton Finlay by Dom Sylvester Houedard (includes 11 concrete poems by Finley)
- British Typography; Piet Zwart; and British photography (exhibition reviews)
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.