TYPOGRAPHICA 10
Herbert Spencer [Editor]
Herbert Spencer [Editor]: TYPOGRAPHICA 10. London: Lund Humphries, December 1964. First edition [New Series]. A fine perfect-bound magazine in stiff printed wrappers with a nearly fine uncoated dustjacket printed in one color: orange dustwrapper lightly soiled. 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. 9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 64 pages printed on a variety of paper stocks. Reproduction techniques for this issue include letterpress and offset-lithography. Paper stocks include matte and uncoated.
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.
Issue 10 (December 1964: 64-pages) Contents:
- Newspaper Seals by Alan Hutt
- The Compass Rose by W.E. May
- The Emergence of the Printer's Stock Block by Charles Hasler
- Sex and Typography by Robert Brownjohn
"For some reason (probably clear to a psychiatrist) four design projects in which I have recently been involved have all had a strong emphasis on sex in the form of the female anatomy."
Robert Brownjohn wrote in his article 'Sex and Typography,' that the idea sprang directly from his 'disordered' mind and he described the composition as an integration of sex, typography and meaning. A perfect encapsulation of an experience that can be described as 'simultaneity,' in other words seeing and reading, both at once.
"In the last 15 years, in typography the real advance has been the use of type not as an adjunct to an illustration or photo, but in its use as the image itself."
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.
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
out of stock