England's Greatest Type Designer Is Not Who You Think It Is

By Stephen J. Gertz

William Caslon, John Baskerville, Eric Gill, and Matthew Carter: these are the names we associate with great British type design. To the top of that list add Richard Austin. Modern typeface design begins with him.

Who was Richard Austin and why are his typefaces so important? And who, by the way, was Richard Austin, wood-cut engraver?

Rich. Austin
Engraver of Dies, Stamps & CopperPlates

Cuts all Sorts of Musick, Engravers Tools, Steel Letters,
& Figures for Letter Founders, Mathematical Instument
Makers, Steel Engravers, & all Arts -
N.B. Copper Plates neatly Printed on the
Shortest Notice.

Richard Austin (1756-1833), type-cutter, created the types for Bell & Stephenson's British Letter Foundry in 1788, as well as types for other foundries. In 1812, Austin produced the types known as Scotch Roman. He also perfected the revolutionary Porson Greek typeface of Cambridge University Press. He established the Imperial Letter Foundry in 1815. Richard Austin, "who changed the whole character of Type Founding from the old face style (as it is now termed), with its disproportionate letters and long s's, into the truly elegant characters of the present day" (James Mosley) was the father of modern English typefaces. To his everlasting credit, he killed the traditional f-like long "s" that bedevils modern readers of eighteenth century and earlier texts in english.

His son, Richard Turner Austin (1781-1842), was a prolific wood-cut engraver. It was once thought that Richard Austin, typeface designer, and Richard Austin, wood-cut engraver, were one and the same person. Alastair M. Johnston, in his new book, Transitional Faces, sets the record straight.

This is the first full-length study of the Austins and their place within British printing and publishing history. Based upon previously unpublished material, Johnston, the printer and publisher (of Poltroon Press in Berkeley, California), has written a rich, vibrant, and engaging account of the Austins, their times and the milieu within they lived and worked.

This exhaustive investigation, which includes 158 pages of text plus an illustrated survey of Richard Turner Austin's engravings (with 130 examples) and appendices totaling an additional 205 pages, might, as is so often the case with scholastic work on a somewhat obscure subject, be an arid affair, desiccating the frontal lobes of readers. Fortunately, Mr. Johnston (a contributor to Booktryst) is incapable of producing such a work. His analysis of type design and its particulars, which might otherwise cause eyes to glaze, is, in Johnston's narrative, enlivened by his liberal wash of colorful detail and vivid characterization of people and places. 

The book's title, Transitional Faces, refers to British printing during the Georgian era when type-designer Austin flourished. The British government, protective of industry, had prevented foreign craftsmen from working in the trade but their skill could not be ignored. The French were doing marvelous things and their influence upon type-design in Britain was enormous. Richard Austin's incorporation of French type aesthetics into British design, "began an era in English type founding (referred to as 'transitional' by Updike, II, 116, 142), a glorious but short-lived time of harmonious types that had the larger-on-the-body proportions of the Romain du roi with the modeling of Baskerville but with more color and fine serifs…'it represents in fact our first independent design,' said [Stanley] Morison, 'owing only its scale to continental models…the type possesses a harmony in serif formation as between roman and italic not possessed by the French type.'"

It's impossible to discuss the career of Richard Turner Austin, the wood-engraving son of Richard Austin, without surveying the work of the great Thomas Bewick and the world of eighteenth century wood-cut book illustrations. Johnston has, thankfully, devoted an introductory chapter to printed eighteenth century art to prime us on Austin Jr.

Because of Thomas Bewick's influence on wood-cut illustration, Richard Turner Austin is often presumed to have been a pupil or apprentice of his; Austin hewed closely to Bewick's style in his natural imagery. Indeed, many of Austin's unsigned blocks have been attributed to Bewick. and, too, much of Austin's early work copied stock blocks or the work of Bewick. For this reason, early historians neglected him.

But Austin Jr. made connections and was soon executing engravings after paintings by William Marshall Craig (c. 1765-1828). In 1819 he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he worked consistently for the next ten years, his blocks, alas, unsigned. We know he did the work simply because, as Johnston points out, there were no alternative engravers who might have produced the scores of woodblocks that suddenly appeared in the "Athens of the North."

Yet by 1839, Richard Turner Austin's reputation and work were in critical decline. His wood-cuts, rarely signed, slowly fell from notice and he became a footnote in wood engraving history.

It's a direct line from Richard Austin Sr. to W.A. Dwiggins, the great twentieth century typeface designer. In 1939, Dwiggins modeled his Caledonia for linotype after Austin's Scotch Roman. Austin's Bell and Scotch Roman faces were major influences upon Matthew Carter's digital typefaces.

"Thus," as Johnston concludes, "the essence of Austin, diluted somewhat by modern technology, is still a part of our typographical experience."

With Transitional Faces Alastair Johnston has resurrected the lives of the father and son, and reevaluated their careers. The Austins now take their rightful place in the history of British printing and engraving.

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JOHNSTON, Alastair M. Transitional Faces. The Lives & Work of Richard Austin, Type-Cutter, & Richard Turner Austin, Wood-Engraver. Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 2013. First edition. Octavo. x, [2],, 387, [1] pp. Illustrated throughout. Burgundy cloth, gilt lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket.

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How WET Can You Get?

by Alastair Johnston 

Leonard Koren, Making WET: the magazine of Gourmet Bathing, Point Reyes, Ca: Imperfect Publishing, 2012

 WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (1976–81), was a pioneering example of a California “lifestyle” magazine that was as much about the design and packaging as about the content. There were ads that looked like editorial content and vice versa. Ostensibly about bathing, it ran from 1976 until 1981, when the editor, Leonard Koren, left Venice, California, moved to San Francisco and then to Japan.

  The influence of Japanese culture increased steadily in the US, particularly the West Coast states, after the Second World War. Zen Buddhism was an important element, but so were the graphic arts. And there is the Japanese tea ceremony. “The Japanese tea room – despite its very appealing form and philosophy – was too culturally specific for the vague purposes I had in mind,” said Koren, who was a former architecture student looking for a direction.

   Koren wanted to create some kind of visual expression that was not in the mainstream. He had been thinking about bathrooms as important but overlooked places that were private and cleansing: they had illumination, heat and water. They involved nakedness and contemplation. He had used images of bathers in a series of artworks, and came up with the idea of a magazine about bathing. His magazine was to be about enthusiasms, and since California is about extremes, he though he would create a parody of enthusiasts.

   His inspiration was threefold, first there was Vogue which he saw as dogmatic, full of bombastic bluster and grand pronouncements about fashion, such as “BROWN is the new BLACK!” Then there was Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which was a compendium of beautifully presented drivel by self-important minor celebrities; and thirdly, there was Gourmet, a foodie magazine which featured pretentious articles about meals. Koren liked the idea of a tongue-in-cheek combination of all three, a “Magazine of Gourmet Bathing,” that was and was not about bathing: mud baths and soaps can only hold your attention for so long, but pretty much anything could work in the context. He started working on WET and delivered the magazine to friends in Venice Beach and Santa Monica, networking to sell ads or find contributors.

WET June/July 1977, photo by Raul Vega; design by Tom Ingalls & April Greiman

   In April 1977 he met the designer Tom Ingalls who had design world connections to photographers and graphic artists, that would improve the look of the magazine from a funky typewritten fanzine into something with more polish. At the time Ingalls was going through a break-up with his girlfriend April Greiman, and Koren hoped they could get along long enough to get the April/June issue of the magazine done. Greiman was on the verge of becoming one of the key figures in the LA design world. Her background was in textiles and she had gone to Basel, Switzerland, to study at the Art School there, but the faculty had plugged her into a series of courses in typography that were to transform her interests. She took the Swiss style she had been schooled in, and elements of Russian Constructivism she had picked up in Europe, and deconstructed them, leading to a postmodern style in American design in the 1980s (popularized, for example, on record album covers from Los Angeles-based labels).

  Cultural historian Frances Butler referred to it as “The LA Slash-and-Spritz style” because of the pieces of film, rubylith and artificial blotches added to the clean layouts that were appearing with the introduction of computerized design. No longer were jobs typeset in metal, repro-ed and pasted up, now there were photo-compositors, and most of the pre-press work was done on the light table. This led to a certain sterility in graphics that Greiman saw at once, and countered with stray bits of Zip-a-tone screen, registration marks and other tools which were normally invisible – a “baring the device” technique that had become popular in literature and film long before. In 1981, Butler wrote, “Sometimes the connection between visual incidents is not made explicit and the reader must try to trap these incidents into a syntax. Much contemporary graphic design has essentially a reader-sequencing structure. This is true of many Japanese posters, especially the early work of Tadanori Yokoo, and now the poster work of the Los Angeles slash-and-spritz school.”

WET September/October 1979, the "Religion" issue: Ricky Martin photographed by Guy Webster; designed by April Greiman & Jayme Odgers

  WET quickly evolved from a funky typewritten news-letter to a slick glossy publication and this attracted attention and advertisers. And while the content is more or less immaterial to advertisers, the nudity aspect didn’t hurt. As Koren said, “There is an appetite for nakedness – not the stagey, self-conscious nakedness of skin magazines, but the nakedness that lets the body pass by itself through the awakening and regenerating extremes of hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry, that the natural environment is so kind to provide.”

  The magazine took off (events at bath houses created a buzz in the press, followed by television interviews in hot tubs, and Mademoiselle editors coming to mud bath parties) and attracted a lot of talented Angeleno artists: designers John Van Hamersveld, Taki Ono and Rip Georges, cartoonists Matt Groening, Futzie Nutzle and Gary Panter, photographers Herb Ritts, Raul Vega and Jayme Odgers. Some at the start of their careers, lent their talents cheaply and helped push the boundaries of art and design that WET would become known for.

  Koren said, “Scattered throughout California there are certain latter-day saints – a dangerous number of whom seem to be artists, photographers, or writers – who get the joke of gourmet bathing without having it explained. Which is fortunate because the concept is so evanescent and mercurial that to attempt explanation is to risk over-kill.” He did explain that it is not a system, a therapy or a philosophy, it is “at most a point of view having some--thing to do with sensuality, humor, humility, and taking such pleasure in small things that they stop being small.”

WET September/October 1980, design by John Van Hamersveld

  
   The magazine continually reinvented itself. For one thing the designers used it as a calling card to move on to other better-paying or higher profile gigs, but through new approaches to graphics and editorial content, it evolved. John Van Hamersveld, who had already achieved design fame with covers for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (1972: a collage of Robert Frank photos with scrawled hand-lettering and visible tape and cut marks), Hotter than Hell by Kiss (1974: showing the influence of Tadanori Yokoo), and Eat to the Beat by Blondie (1979: hand-lettering, angled type and a grid), continued with an illustration career; Jayme Odgers’ trade-mark image of a hand holding a Polaroid was featured on Fleetwood Mac and other best-selling album covers; Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” cartoon made its first appearance in WET in 1978: it grew to a weekly syndication of 250 papers and launched Groening’s TV show “The Simpsons.”

   Koren found the thematic approach (e.g., “Religion”) was a good solution to pulling an issue together. He persuaded poet Lewis MacAdams to move south from Bolinas and assume the role of editor, which he fulfilled excellently, bringing in another range of literary connections, including William Burroughs’ essay “Is language a virus?” An article on necrophilia created a furor – and sold copies. Koren was well-networked. He dropped in on Noel Young in Santa Barbara and got a copy of Henry Miller’s essay “On Turning Eighty,” which ran in the magazine, as did an article on Henry Miller’s bathroom (Sept/Oct 1981). Fashion and music joined the regular contents. Kristine McKenna brought interviews with musicians that had uncensored language and ideas, making them unfit for more mainstream media. WET caught the Zeitgeist and was light and ephemeral, not predictable or ponderous. The ads blended into the editorial content and vice versa, creating a unified style, which is always desirable in a magazine.

WET September/October 1981, design by "King Terry" Teruhiko Yumura

 
    Koren refers to wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of finding beauty in imperfection, and seeing profundity in nature, as one of his guiding principles. D. T. Suzuki described wabi-sabi as “an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.” In graphics there is a style known as hata-uma or good/bad art (literally “clumsy-tasty,” referring to the occasional appeal of the badly drawn), which extends wabi-sabi to illustration. Koren hired Tokyo-based Teruhiko Yumura as art director in 1981. Yumura (known in WET as King Terry) brought this fresh style to LA design and it influenced Gary Panter and others. Again confusing editorial and advertising matter, there is a full-page ad for Terry’s Hit Parade, a “full-color action art book from Japan’s number one illustrator,” available exclusively as a “terrible WET book.”

   The successful marketing of the Californian lifestyle, particularly in the context of water, was a trend that continued with Beach Culture (late 80s) and Ray Gun (Santa Monica, 1992–2000) magazines, designed by David Carson, that were also essentially pointless, but graphically far less interesting.
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A Beatnik from the Middle Ages

by Alastair Johnston

Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter The Life & Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, edited by Nicole Simpson (n.p., occasional papers) 192 pp., paperback, with color illustrations $30

Though not as well known as his contemporaries Dieter Rot and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) is acknowledged to be one of the key figures in the concrete poetry movement of the 1960s. Starting (roughly speaking) from Apollinaire's Calligrammes, as well as Dadaist and Futurist experiments (Yes, I have heard of Ancient Greek acrostics), poets took an interest in the typographic form of their verse. Live performance also became an important component in twentieth-century poetry. For most people, poetry in the 1950s and 60s is synonymous with drug-taking Beatniks, but Houédard was a Benedictine monk who lived and worked in Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire, England. And while he was active in the poetry and small press publishing scene in the 1960s, his work has now vanished: most of it unique or produced in small editions ended up in private collections.

A lot of his creative output was in the form of typed pages produced late at night in his cell on his trusty portable Olivetti (like Aram Saroyan, he failed to interest the Italian typewriter company in sponsorship -- or even acceptance of how their machine had become a vital part of artmaking). dsh typed letters manifestos and sometimes would disconnect the platen to make free-floating abstract images using the typewriter keys. In this his work is similar to that of H.N. Werkman, the Dutch artist of the 1930s and 40s, whose typed 'tiksels' he would have seen in Typographica. dsh made poem objects (though often using non-archival plastic), and he published in little magazines.

a particular way of looking (1971)
courtesy of Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry

But dsh was instrumental in bringing a wider appreciation of concrete poetry (which includes sound poems in performance) to Britain. He first wrote about it in Herbert Spencer's influential bi-annual journal Typographica 8. He reached out to the Noigandres group in Brazil, Eugen Gomringer and Henri Chopin in Europe, and other British practitioners like Finlay, Bob Cobbing, and Edwin Morgan. He started Openings Press with the artist John Furnival and they involved German typographer Hansjörg Mayer in their productions also.

A spiritual as well as literary activist, dsh got out of the abbey to become engaged with the Tibetan community who were foundering once the Chinese had kicked them out of their homeland. As a child dsh had read in the paper of the "God-king" of Tibet and was fascinated, particularly since the British press did not use the quotation marks. His War service in India (with Army Intelligence in Bangalore) made him aware of how the spiritual becomes the everyday in some cultures. He was interested in Zen and read the writings of D. T. Suzuki. In 1949 he joined the monastery and was ordained as a priest ten years after. Later in life he became involved with the Oxford-based ibn Arabi society. So his was in fact an ecumenical dialogue with poetry.

In addition he spent five years as literary editor of the Jerusalem Bible (1961-6).

His most famous poem is a revision of 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's famous "Frog" haiku, whose terse seventeen syllables read

     furu ike ya
     kawazu tobi ko mu
     mizu no oto

I am sure you know it by heart. But dsh stripped it even further to

            f  r o g
           p o n d
           p l  o p

Memorial print (litho, silkscreen & letterpress) by John Furnival, 1992

In later versions he enlarged the three Os, making them into an enso, or Zen circle, and further blurring the boundaries between poetry and painting. This reduction communicates his idea of "paintings and poems that are not 'about' life but that ARE live direct living acts."

dsh was very much an artist in the spirit of his age -- David Toop describes him (tonsured with horn-rims) as either "Sergeant Bilko in the unfolding of a scam or a beatnik from the Middle Ages, time-transported to the delirium of London's avant garde." Toop describes the sound poetry of the time (performed at "serious" venues like the Hayward Gallery or the ICA, so not merely coffee-shop ravings) as incorporating shamanic and secret speech, and he mentions the "range from Antonin Artaud to Slim Gaillard, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins to Professor Stanley Unwin."

dsh also collaborated with John Cage in the mid-60s, though how this came across in performance remains a paradox. They performed jointly in the "Chieko Shiomi Concert of Falling Events." Here are his notes for three of the seven movements in their collaborative work "c-dagesh" (the title is based on their names "cage" + "dsh"; dagesh is the Hebrew dot that accents letters to make them hard sounds at the beginning of words), a "7 note suite":

cevent

leave room for seven days: re-enter & sweep toward typewriter: type the following poem:

     c  -
            CC
         h -
            H
            H
           - observe dust resulting - some particles will have downward movements - those settling on the surface of the poems paper-environment constitute the total phonic event

seven-t

asked two tibetan policemonks to hold a teak door horizontal - on it deposited a single bead of quicksilver - for 17 hours they succeeded in keeping the bead on the wood - 17 hours later an ant i had popped into a fold of the habit of one of them caused him to scratch with his left hand - & the bead rolled off the edge

heaven-t

wrote words cacaca lemm - nenipi roto tut - cut paper into 20 pieces - dropped on lawn from tuliptree they formed word immaculatecontraception

dsh 141164 Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of concrete & Visual Poetry

   

That dsh was greatly loved and respected by his contemporaries is clear here from their devotion in the essays and the careful reproduction of his typed letters and typewriter poems. There are type facsimiles of his major essays and a bibliography. One of the contributors, Charles Verey, is working on a full-scale biography of dsh.

The poems are a delight but the main course is the group of five essays included. dsh is curious and smart and takes the pulse of the moment (end of 1963) in "Beat and Afterbeat: a parallel condition of poetry and theology," written in familiar beat-prosody which readers of Ginsberg and Kerouac will recognize. His bibliography for this article includes four works of Anselm ("the Finn at the BBC") Hollo: Red Cats, Jazz Poems, Paul Klee, and & what else is new, a small poetry pamphlet; the Selected Poems of Corso (just published in England) alongside Edith Sitwell's latest collection; two magazines (Evergreen Review & Pa'lante) and a list of anthologies that defined the canon of 60s poetry: New American Poetry edited by Don Allen, Living Voices edited by Jon Silkin, New Departures edited by Michael Horovitz, Poetry Today edited by Elizabeth Jennings, and A. Alvarez's Penguin anthology, The New Poetry; he also includes Elias Wilentz' The Beat Scene. The first page is a total rush:

So what's happening? 1963 times running short & poetry the mad sad joy of the shadow church wefting nylon tantras inter man & man & world & Yahweh patching up the zimzum with a certified 2-way stretch of now & bursting thru our mental claptraps giftwraps & stale thought-think outlines with delirious mantic words has come a bit unstuck. And poetry here to begin with can include any even 1-line stuff from real poet shadow saints.

Then he introduces Anselm Hollo, before getting on to Vatican 2! A few pages later he tells us what's wrong:

After WW-2 we never felt naively déçu like after WW-1: partly because of the 20s partly because the 40s saw the real shrinkage (planetarisation) of the world begin partly because todays ultimate horror is the art-protest area built-in to new social fabrics (Germany England France America) that make both god & poet hygienic.

He rapses waxodical about the Beats: calling Burroughs a "writing liver." He feels for Corso, adores the hairy smelly Ginsy, but his biggest thrill is meeting another French-Catholic in Jean-Louis Kerouac. (dsh was born Pierre Houédard in Guernsey which is a British isle but geographically French.) What he detects is a heart/mind schism and he tries to explain this in art as well as theology:

…this new beat/monknik wind of popular fauve livedeparture biblical-liturgical theologies reacting against dessicated past systematisations - & this 2nd live wind of creative systematisation or cubist theology freezing for dead guests the mind-spirit impetus by conceptual bottling while hosts with satori participate in this & every insight - like reverse zen-archery & readers the hit becoming the hitters.

His task in this article is "the impossible serialisation of the surreal." He manages to separate British-English poetry from American-English, but only just, and sees the hope in pidgin "(esp Ee Tiang Hong of Malay Wale Soyinka of Nigeria & Zulfikar Ghose of Pakistan; french equivalents have had more influence on french eg alive negro poets Ed Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor - lyric firbank/lorca negritude)."

Hollo, he thinks, is too too kind to the Brits, but also "whats it like to be translated by ah? A jokey fauve sensation like going through a loss-of-outline tank - he's creative exciting as zen when loose on noncrib russian translation he ties his love into lovely knots with two loose ends. His J poets are the ones to watch…"

dsh ends this blockbuster essay/crash course in modern poetry with a flourish:

The mad gay bliss of benedictine gravitas - so other than puritanical seriosità. Some people (?Mary McCarthy) get so wild at this sort of thing: theyd rather go to what they think their image of hell ought to be just to PROVE that gods like the image theyve given up of him reflecting themselves. They cld SHAKE that god - where the new wave just breezes around unzipping him & showing the mysterys all much deeper more mysterious. The new wave & the new wind are in the same direction: life prayer poetry jazz are participation in creativeness in god - they just dont exist outside performance.

i possibly am again (1967, PVC laminate) Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of concrete & Visual Poetry

The second essay "Between Poetry & Painting" is a Master's Thesis in telegrammatic form. dsh explores the Dadaist notion that "word and image are one," or as he puts it, Logos & Ikon on equal terms. There are no illustrations (but you can find many of them in Massin's Lettre et Image [Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970]), however a very wide range of sources is cited in his chronology including another clever typo: "1923 Werkman begins his 600 druksels: e. e. cunnings writes tulips and chimneys." Musicians, painters and architects make it to his shortlist as well as asian/arabic/hebrew sources. We also get a key glimpse inside his mind/lair when he contrasts his kinetic concrete poetry with writing about it:

kinkon/spatial is cool: hot-media (like this note about things) leave nothing unsaid: depend on fictitious feudal-author caged spirit in superior private-mind bossing the tenants of his literary space: cool is nouvelle-vague selfregulating anarchic system - communicator-receptor on equal terms sharing telstar communication ball…

wind grove mind alone
Courtesy John Rylands Library

His famous essay "Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay" expands on the last in more detail, explaining his terms such as constructivist, constrictive, nonsemantic & coexistential. "Introductionancestry Andchronology" is more of the same, this time with an emphasis on sound poetry (Finlay is a visual artist or environmental word-sculptor). These essays presents one aspect of Houédard's work; his commentaries on Meister Eckhart will have to wait for another anthology, but for those of us interested in visual arts and the poetic conjunction between language & typography this is a hefty box of chocs.
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Dust Jacket Designer Philip Grushkin From Comps To Final

by Stephen J. Gertz

Philip Grushkin working in his Englewood, NJ home studio, c.1950s.

A major archive of renowned dust jacket designer, Philip Grushkin, "whose work made him the standard-bearer throughout the publishing industry," (NY Times obit) is coming to market courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Booktryst got a sneak preview of its catalog, yet another key reference and collectible work as we've come to expect from the NYC-based super dealer.

Philip Grushkin was born in Brooklyn, NYC, in 1921, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He became interested in book dust jacket design as a teen and began collecting them, those of George Salter (1897-1967), the preeminent American dust jacket designer 1935-1965, his primary interest. He attended Cooper Union college as an art student, studying calligraphy and lettering with Salter, who became his mentor. He graduated in 1941.

After the war, he began to free-lance as a jacket designer, working for virtually all of the major New York publishers of the time: Alfred A. Knopf; Random House; Harper and Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Macmillan; and Doubleday; as well as smaller houses such as Farrar Strauss, John Day, and Crown. He became one of the go-to designers at Knopf because the great book and typeface designer W.A. Dwiggins declined to do dust jackets. Grushkin became part of a select group of dust jacket designers that included Salter, Charles Skaggs, and, on occasion, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, and Alvin Lustig.

In 1947 he joined the the fledgling Book Jacket Designers Guild established by Sol Immermann (1907–1983), who, with H. Lawrence Hoffman, produced the jackets for the first one hundred titles published by The Popular Library. The BJDG established a code for dust jacket design, rejecting the poster style in vogue for pulp novels in favor of a descriptive, non-blaring style. Its manifesto, embraced by Grushkin, rejected:

• "The stunt jacket that screams for your attention, and then dares you to guess what the book is about."

• "The jacket that is born of the assumption that if the book has a heroine, or if the author is a woman, or the author's mother a female, the jacket must say SEX."

• "Burlap backgrounds, the airbrush doilies and similar clichés as well as the all too many good illustrations that were stretched, squeezed, tortured and mutilated to fit a jacket format with just enough room left for an unrelated title."

1953.

Grushkin's hallmark, like Salter's, was his creative use of calligraphy and lettering in concert with a lightly drawn illustration. His early work tends to mimic Salter's but in the late 194os his own personal style began to emerge, with an emphasis on lettering and calligraphy often to the exclusion of illustration altogether. Perhaps his most recognizable and typical dust jacket from that period is that for Simone De Bouvier's The Second Sex (1953).

If you are unfamiliar with Grushkin his deceptively simple yet visually aggressive pictorial style is distinctive; once you see a Grushkin book jacket you will begin to see them all over the place on books published during the late 1940s - early 1960s.

"Grushkin forged his own brand of modernism, one that owed nothing to the work of Lustig, Rand, or Herbert Bayer, inventing a unique mixture of bold typographic hand lettering, dynamic background patterns, vibrant colors, and abstract symbolism. By the end of the 1950s, Grushkin’s style was distilled to the point where it resembled Paul Bacon’s 'Big Book Look,' with hand lettering - instead of calligraphy - taking center stage, augmented only by a tonally variegated background" (Paul Shaw, Philip Grushkin: a Designer's Archive, catalog to the collection).

Below, a few examples of Grushkin's work in development, from first comp to final jacket.

The Other Side of the Record (1947):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fifth comp.

Final.

The Train From Pittsburgh (1948):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fourth comp, side notes.

The fourth comp of Train..., unusually, has notations, not just by Grushkin, but also by "J" at Knopf (likely production manager Sidney Jacobs). Grushkin’s notes refer to the colors he plans to use - blue, red, and yellow - with a reminder that the jacket will be offset printed. The notation by “J” approves the design but suggests substituting the calligraphic lettering of Julian Farren's name to a clean, serif'ed typeface.

Fifth and final.

Mechanical - Shards of Glass.

Mechanical - Lettering.

Helix (1947):

Partial comp.

In what was, apparently, the first (and partial) comp for David Loughlin's novel, Helix (1947), Grushkin employs a blue background, a single swirling spiral, and title lettering running upward on a diagonal from left to right.

First complete comp.

In the above, the first complete comp for the Helix DJ, Grushkin loses the blue background and substitutes red, has the title lettering on a downward diagonal from left to right, acutely triangulates the author and title, features a series of smudgy, overlapping spirals, and adds a tiny ship moving along a black plane.

Second complete comp.

Grushkin's second complete comp for Helix refined his design in the first comp, downplaying the swirling spirals,  deleting the ship's black path, and adding black "gears," elements that made it to the final published dust jacket.

Final.

Grushkin's final design for Helix cleans up, clarifies, and polishes the second comp.

Limbo mechanical.

Final.

The lettering mechanical for an early comp of Grushkin's DJ for Bernard Wolfe's classic science-fiction novel, Limbo (1952) bears a different subtitle than the final. "A Voyage of Discovery and Adventure in the Fantastic World of 1990" must have seemed a tantalizing teaser in 1952. The teaser to the final certainly hammers it home: "A diabolic tale - mad, merry and monstrous - of men and women caught in the vortex of history yet to happen! Check out that mad, merry, and monstrous year, 1990, more frightening that Wolfe could ever have imagined:

• Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces after acting as dictator of Panama for five years.

• Notorious Gambino crime family leader John "the Dapper Don" Gotti was arrested and charged with racketeering, murder, and various and sundry illegal activities.

• Marion Barry, the flamboyant mayor of Washington D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine in an F.B.I. sting set up in a D.C. hotel room.

• British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned. 

• The first McDonald's restaurant opened in Moscow, becoming for many a symbol of the nation's new progressive free market ideology.

• The World Wide Web was created, along with the first ever web page and web browser.

• Time Inc and Warner Communications, two of the largest media companies in the world merged to create giant Time Warner.

That's some vortex. We're lucky to have made it through 1990 alive.

The Grushkin archive consists of his book jackets (with related comps, roughs and mechanicals); binders of his cover designs for Mercury Publications; letterhead and logo designs; related ephemera; and a collection of book jackets by George Salter: over 2,000 total items in all, 150 of which are highlighted in the catalog, with the largest and most important portion being the dust jackets by Grushkin.

"'His life was literally books,' said his son, Paul, noting that some 10,000 volumes lined the walls of the Grushkins' home.

"Yet, he was an invisible presence, his work evident only to a book's author, the publisher's editorial and design staff, the printer and the bindery" (Times obit).

"My Dad was also a book designer. He handled in his lifetime close to 1500 books, for many publishers, but most for Harry N. Abrams, the worldwide leader in artbooks. He told me a book design is successful when it's invisible, meaning the reader never has to labor to overcome the designer. In a good book design, the grid and typographic elements illuminate the author's concept along with the book's contents. Nothing jars that reader from experiencing the book - nothing in the design is so boastful that it's the designer who's calling out, before anything else, 'look at MY cleverness'" (Paul Grushkin). 

Book lovers, special collections librarians, and aficionados and collectors of dust jackets will be fortunate to score a copy of the Grushkin Archive catalog, luckier still to acquire the archive itself. While it's not unusual to track a writer's progress through their archive, it isn't often that we have an opportunity to see a dust jacket designer in the midst of their process from conception to completion.

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All images reproduced with the express permission of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, with our thanks.
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Nice Ass, Great Binding

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1904, publisher George Bell and Sons issued a beautifully designed and printed edition of the ancient classic The Golden Ass, aka Metamorphosis, by Apuleius in its 1566 English translation by William Adlington. Published in an edition of 200 numbered copies for sale, it was printed by the Chiswick Press.

In 1960, a copy of the Chiswick Golden Ass received fine binding treatment.  It was bound by Bernard Kiernan.

Now, in 2012, that copy is the subject of a Booktryst post with teasing headline of dubious taste. Aim high, swing low.

Title-page.

Kiernan bound the copy in full light brown morocco with fifteen onlaid deep purple morocco medallions with a radiating sun motif in gilt to the upper and lower boards, each medallion encircled by a black morocco border. Six compartments with onlaid gray morocco hexagons and black morocco label lettered in gilt grace the spine. Inside, burnt orange morocco doublures with gilt rays emanating from a plain central oval stagger the eyes when the book is opened. All edges are gilt.

Few are aware of master bookbinder Bernard Kiernan (1922-1967). Bernard Henry Kierman  took up bookbinding as a hobby in 1954 at age thirty-two. He was largely self-taught and became a member of the Guild of Contemporary Binders in 1958 and exhibited at Foyles in the same year. He was elected a Fellow of the Guild but, alas, died in 1967 at age forty-five. Bibliographer J.R. Abbey had a number of books bound by him, one of which is illustrated in The Anthony Dowd Collection of Modern Bindings (John Rylands University Library, 2002, pp. 106-7). He also bound a copy of Craig's Irish Bookbindings 1600-1800 which was in William Foyle's collection. A copy of Charles Holme's The Art of  the Book bound by Kiernan is found in the British Library. Many volumes in the Gutteridge collection of books on cricket were bound by Kiernan. He was held in high regard for his original designs and tooling skills, as splendidly displayed here. His career was short, his work distinguished.

Cover detail.

Few, if any, care about publisher George Bell and Sons. But The Chiswick Press is another matter entirely. Peel back the skin of the Private Press movement and the enormous influence of the Chiswick Press lies exposed.

Woodcut historiated initial.

"Chiswick Press was established in the printing shop of Charles Whittingham (1767-1840) in 1787. Although the press moved on a few occasions, it operated for the most part in London, England. Chiswick Press became influential in English printing and typography and, most notably, published some of the early designs of William Morris. The press continued to operate until 1962" (Special Collections, University of Missouri Libraries).

Front doublure.

In 1811, Whittingham began printing inexpensive editions of the classics. In 1838, his nephew and apprentice of the same name, Charles Whittingham (1795-1876), assumed control of Chiswick, and under his stewardship the press revived old typefaces and made a concerted effort to improve the quality of typographical design and printing in England, which had fallen low.

Historiated initial.

The high quality that Chiswick Press brought to English printing became the craft's gold standard in the U.K. Chiswick Press was a trade printer - Great Britain's finest -  servicing publishers (it became the most in-demand print shop of nineteenth century England), but its influence extended beyond job work. It played an important role in the development of the Private Press movement, which strove to meet and exceed the mastery of the Chiswick Press. They printed many of William Morris's early books, and the great printer and designer, Emery Walker, a founding father of the Arts & Crafts movement who established the Doves Press with T.J. Cobden-Sanderson in 1900, used the Chiswick Press to print  an edition of  Burns' The Pied Piper  of Hamelin in 1889. The Chiswick Press printed books for the Riccardi Press, the Folio Society, Boar's Head Press, etc.

Stamped signature to rear doublure.

I don't pretend to know all there is to know about rare books; I only became aware of the Chiswick Press a few months ago yet I consider it an embarrassing lacuna in my knowledge. Now, as if seeing a previously unknown consumer product or car for the first time, I  find references to it all over the place. And this copy of The Golden Ass bound by Kiernan holds a place of honor.

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Frontispiece.

[KIERNAN, Bernard, binder]. APULEIUS. The Golden Ass. Translated by William Adlington. London: Chiswick Press for George Bell and Sons, 1904.

One of two hundred numbered copies, this being copy no. 195, out of a total edition of 220. Quarto (13 1/8 x 8 in; 335 x 203 mm). [17, blank], [1, limitation], [1, half-title], [1, blank], [6], 226, [1, colophon], [11 blank] pp. Frontispiece and title page by W.L. Bruckman; title page in red and black. Rubricated headlines and running heads, text in black. Historiated woodcut initials in black. Shoulder notes in red and black.

Bound in 1960 by Bernard Kiernan.

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Many thanks to Edward Bayntun-Coward for information about Bernard Kiernan.

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Images courtesy David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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