#libanus press

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Typography Tuesday

This week, it’s all Greek to us . . . with an emphasis on Dutch type and book designer Jan van Krimpen’s Antigone typeface, designed in 1927. The images shown here are from the article “Greek Types and Van Krimpen’s Antigone” in Matrix 4, Winter 1984, pp. 37-41, by Michael Mitchell (1940-2018), founder and proprietor of Libanus Press in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England. The press was about to publish a new, bilingual (Greek/English) edition of Plato’s Symposium using Van Krimpen’s Antigone typeface, and Mitchell saw this an an opportunity to examine Greek types over the ages as a way of understanding the lineage of Antigone.

He offers a summary of Greek type used over five centuries from Aldus to Garamond and Bodoni to Van Krimpen. Curiously, he does not give John Baskerville’s controversial Greek typeface any mention, perhaps because it was only used once. He does offer a sample page of Libanus Symposium‘s use of of Van Krimpen’s beautiful Antigone (matched with Van Krimpen’s Lutetia for the English). The last image presents examples of the development of Greek typefaces from the 15th to 20th centuries.

Matrix was printed by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

SIMON BRETT

This week we showcase two wood engravings (with one in two colors) by the incomparable English illustrator and wood engraver Simon Brett. The first two are the same engraving printed in black and mustard yellow from Claire Van Vliet’s 1976 Janus Press printing in Vermont of Thom Gunn’s poetry collection The Missed Beat, printed from the original block on Okawara paper for Anthony Baker’s Gruffyground Press in an edition of 120 copies. 

The last engraving is from British poet Peter Levi’s Music of Dark Tones AMDG [Ad maiorem Dei gloriam] printed in Marlborough, Wiltshire, at Michael Mitchell’s Libanus Press for Brett’s own Paulinus Press in an edition of 200 copies signed by the poet and artist.

Simon Brett was a student of the equally incomparable wood engraver Clifford Webb. Brett taught at Marlborough College Art School from 1971-1989, operated the Paulinus Press from 1981-1988, served as chair of the now over-100-years-old Society of Wood Engravers from 1986-1992, and has written widely on the history and practice of wood-engraving. A 50-year retrospective of Brett’s wood-engravings was held at Bankside Gallery, London, Art Jericho, Oxford, and Holburne Museum, Bath, 2013-14.

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Typography Tuesday

We take a lighthearted turn this Tuesday with a few wood engravings of illustrated initials by Australian/English designer and printmaker Edwina Ellis from her 1983 book The Animal Alphabet, printed on Velin d’Arches paper by Michael Mitchell at his Libanus Press in Marlborough, England, in an edition of 75 copies. Each engraving has a stately, yet whimsical quality about it, and we are certainly amused by how Ellis resolved the problem of X.

The top image includes original wood engravings by Ellis reprinted for inclusion in New Zealander/British rare-book dealer Michael Taylor’s review of “Fine Private Press Books of 1982,” in Matrix 3, Winter 1983, pp. 137-141, printed in November 1983 by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in Andoversford, Gloucestershire, in an edition of 475 copies. The next set of images are taken from the artist/retired-special-collections-library-assistant blog site nelabligh.com. Unfortunately, Taylor’s review of Animal Alphabet comes as a perfunctory aside at the very end of his survey:

Well that I suppose should be the end except that something must be said about E. N. Ellis’s delightful Animal Alphabet. . . . There is a tipsy unicorn, a smug turtle, and an apposite kangaroo. . . . The engravings are printed one to a page in a small format (5 1/2 x 4 ins.) . . . . Michael Mitchell printed seventy-five copies for E. N. Ellis . . . with his usual flair and proficiency.

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Typography Tuesday

Edward Johnston and the London Underground

The great British designer and calligrapher Edward Johnston is principally remembered for two things: almost single-handedly reviving calligraphy as an art form in the 20th century and designing the famous sans-serif Johnston typeface that was used throughout the London Underground system from 1916 until it was redesigned in the 1980s by Banks & Miles. 

Frank Pick, the Commercial Manager of London Underground Railway, commissioned a “block letter” alphabet from Edward Johnston in 1916. It is thought to be the first modern sans serif typeface, preceding the Erbar-Grotesk of Jakob Erbar (1922), Paul Renner’s Futura (1927), Rudolf Koch’s Kabel (1927), and Eric Gill’s Gill Sans (1928). Johnston’s distinctive font was actively used by London Transport (LT) for half a century, but began to fall into disuse by the 1970s until its revival in modified form for digital reproduction in the 1980s.

In designing the font, Johnston did not follow centuries-old typographical conventions. The design was originally intended for use in lithographic tracing sheets, and only became metal and wood typefaces in the 1920s. The design’s unconventionality created some spacing challenges when transformed into solid type. Colin Banks, the co-founder with John Miles of Banks & Miles in 1958 which conducted the digital redesign, writes:

Johnston was curiously unaware or willfully indifferent to those five hundred years of typographical experience. The main principle of his block letter was that the thickness of strokes in the letterforms should be absolutely consistent throughout each fount and that is the way he drew them. . . . [He] was determined on his dogma of keeping all stroke thicknesses precisely the same, irrespective of whether they were horizontal, vertical or changing from one to the other, or of how dense or constricted were the shapes that these strokes encompassed. . . . [making for] some very uncomfortable letters. . . .

Johnston realized this problem only later, and as the London Transport’s special sans lettering became predominately used in wood, Johnston applied himself to the problem, producing a table of spaces for LT’s printers to follow. 

The specimens shown here were letterpress printed in 1995 by the Libanus Press using Johnston’s Sans wood type from the London Transport Museum on Aquarelle Arches paper, and inserted into Colin Banks’s article “Edward Johnston and Letter Spacing” in Matrix 15 (1995), published in England by John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press. Our copies of Matrix are donations from our friend and benefactor Jerry Buff.

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