Authors

Stuart Bailey graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, from the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000 – and co-founded the ongoing journal Dot Dot Dot in the same year. His work circumscribes various aspects of graphic design, writing and editing, most consistently in the form of publications made in close collaboration with artists. Since 2002 he has worked with Will Holder under the compound name Will Stuart on a broader range of projects, including theatre and performance. Since 2006 he has worked together with David Reinfurt as Dexter Sinister, also the name of their basement space on New York’s Lower East Side which operates as a ‘just-in-time workshop and occasional bookstore’.

Otto Friedrich Bollnow (1903–91) gained a doctorate in physics with Max Born before studying philosophy with (especially) Georg Misch and Martin Heidegger, finishing his ‘Habilitation’ at Göttingen in 1931. He found it difficult to find a university teaching position, achieving this only in 1938. Then in the war years he was in the German army. In 1946 he began to teach at the University of Mainz, and in 1953 started as a professor of philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Tübingen, where he stayed for the rest of his life. As a writer he was prolific: his bibliography runs to 38 books and about 300 articles: almost none of which have been translated into English. Bollnow’s work can be placed within and between the fields of existentialism and phenomenology. His book of 1963, Human space, is situated there too. For more about him, see here.

Christopher Burke is a typographer, typeface designer, and a writer on modern typographic history. After graduating in Typography & Graphic Communication from the University of Reading he worked at Monotype Typography in the UK. Leaving Monotype, he undertook research at Reading for a PhD on Paul Renner, which he completed in 1995. This provided the basis for his book Paul Renner. From 1996 to 2001 he taught at the University of Reading, where he planned and conceived the MA in typeface design. His Celeste and Parable typefaces are available from FontShop, and Pragma from Neufville Digital. His book on Jan Tschichold, Active literature, was published in 2007. For more, go to Hibernia Type.

Peter Burnhill (1922–2007) was a typographer, artist, and teacher. In 1965 he was part of the group that set up and then ran the course in typography at Stafford College of Art and Design (UK). This was dedicated to a more fundamental and practical approach to education than was common, then or since. Through the 1960s and 1970s he participated in a number of attempts to reform typography in Britain, including the Typographers’ Computer Working Group (from 1965), and the Working Party on Typographic Teaching (from 1966). With the psychologist James Hartley, he wrote and published articles in the Journal of Typographic Research and Visible Language.

Harry Carter (1901–82) was an English typographer and writer. After an education at Bedales School and Oxford University, then training to become a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, he turned to typography, first (1928–9) as an apprentice at the Monotype Corporation, then working first for a printer (Kynoch Press in Birmingham) and then a book-publisher (Nonesuch Press, London). During the Second Word War he served in the British army, and also during this time continued to design and cut type, and to do typographic history. After the war he worked for HMSO (the official state publisher in Britain) as a typographer. In 1954 he became Archivist to the Oxford University Press, working there until his retirement in 1980. In this capacity he became a leading figure in the work of discovery and cataloguing at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. Notable among his publications, under his own name and in collaboration, were Fournier on typefounding (1930), an edition of Moxon’s Mechanick exercises (with Herbert Davis, 1958), Type specimen facsimiles (with others, under the editorship of John Dreyfus, 1963 & 1972), Civilité types (with H.D.L. Vervliet, 1966), Stanley Morison’s John Fell (1967), A view of early typography (1969), and the first volume of a History of Oxford University Press (1975), Charles Enschedé’s Typefoundries in the Netherlands (1978).

Linda Eerme established (in 1987) and for many years ran the bookstore at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Anthony Froshaug (1920–84) was an English typographer and teacher. Born in London to a Norwegian father and English mother, he went to Charterhouse School and the Central School of Arts & Crafts. On leaving the Central in 1939 he began to practice as a freelance graphic designer and typographer. As a typographer he was unusual in running his own small (un-private) press, including two periods of printing in Cornwall (1949–52, 1954–7). This attachment to working with his hands (and feet) in the material production of printing, he combined with a fierce intellect and an often astonishing visual sureness. Froshaug can be considered as the most convincing exponent of modern typography in Britain. Froshaug was a natural teacher: he taught first at the Central School (1948–9, 1952–3), then at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1957–61), the Royal College of Art in London (1961–4), Watford School of Art (1964–6); in 1970 he returned to teach (part-time) at the Central School, continuing there until illness forced him to stop.

Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian, living in London, who writes widely on the crafts. Her major study, The crafts in Britain in the twentieth century, was published in 1999 by Yale University Press. She is one of the editors of the The Journal of Modern Craft.

Jost Hochuli is a Swiss typographer and graphic designer. After study at the Kunstgewerbeschule St. Gallen, he trained as a compositor with the printer Zollikofer and at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich; his education was completed in 1958–9 in Adrian Frutiger’s class at the Ecole Estienne. Since then he has practised as a freelance graphic designer, eventually specializing in book design. In 1979 he co-founded the co-operatively run publishing company VGS Verlagsgemeinschaft St. Gallen, for which much of his book design work has been done. He has taught at the schools at Zurich and then St. Gallen since 1967. As writer and editor, his books include Das Detail in der Typografie (1987, revised edition 2005; an English-language edition, Detail in typography is forthcoming), Bücher machen (1989), Buchgestaltung in der Schweiz (1993), Designing books: practice and theory (1996), _Jost Hochuli: Drucksachen, vor allem Bücher_ (2002). He has edited and designed the annually published ‘Typotron’ series of booklets (1983–98) and the Edition ‘Ostschweiz’ (from 2000).

Robin Kinross is proprietor of Hyphen Press. After graduating (1975) and postgraduating (1979) from the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, he began to do ‘editorial typography’ (editing and design in one process) as well as write about typography. In 1980, while still living in Reading, he re-edited and re-published Norman Potter’s What is a designer as the first book under the imprint of Hyphen Press. In 1982 he moved to London, did behind-the-scenes work for Pluto Press’s political atlases and began to write journalism, especially for the magazine Blueprint in its golden period of the late 1980s. When his book Modern typography came out in 1992, this signalled the start of Hyphen Press as the full-time occupation that it is now. Impatient with authors slow to complete promised works, he resorted to publishing his own words again in the book Unjustified texts (2002). Other books to which he has contributed include Otto Neurath’s Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften (1991) and Jan Tschichold’s The new typography (1995).

Ernest Charles Large (1902–76) was (in chronological order) an English industrial chemist, writer, and plant scientist, best known for his book The advance of the fungi (1940): a magisterial history of plant diseases. His novels Sugar in the air and Asleep in the afternoon come from the period of the mid- to late 1930s when he had left his work in industry and was writing full-time. In 1940 he went back into salaried employment as a research scientist. A third novel, Dawn in Andromeda, was published in 1956.

Karel Martens is a Dutch designer and teacher. After training at the school of art in Arnhem, he has worked as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Alongside this, he has always made free (non-commissioned) graphic and three-dimensional work. His design work ranges widely, from postage stamps, to books, to signs on buildings. All this work is documented and celebrated in the books Karel Martens: drukwerk / printed matter and Karel Martens: counterprint. Martens has taught graphic design since 1977. His first appointment was at the school of art at Arnhem (until 1994). He was then attached to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1994–9). From 1997 he has been a visiting lecturer in the graphic design department at the School of Art, Yale University. In that year, together with Wigger Bierma, he started a pioneering school of postgraduate education within the ArtEZ, Arnhem – the Werkplaats Typografie – where he still teaches.

James Mosley was Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library (London) from 1958 to 2000. He teaches in the Department of Typography at the University of Reading, and at courses in Lyons, Charlottesville, and elsewhere. He was a founding member of the Printing Historical Society and the first editor of its Journal. The author of many essays, reviews, and monographs on printing and typographic history, he has published some notable articles in Typography papers. He also writes online at Typefoundry.

Marie Neurath (née Reidemeister; 1898–1986) was born in Braunschweig (Germany) and studied at the University of Göttingen. In 1924, just before graduation, she met Otto Neurath (1882–1945) in Vienna and (in March 1925) went to work there as his assistant in what was then a small museum of information about housing. At the start of 1925 this became the Gesellschafts- und Wirtshaftsmuseum in Wien (‘Social and Economic Museum of Vienna’). This was the start of her long activity as the main ‘transformer’ (in English, we would now say designer) working with Neurath in the teams that made graphic displays of social information. The other essential member of the Neurath group, the German artist Gerd Arntz (1901–88), joined in 1928. Marie Reidemeister worked at this museum in Vienna until the brief civil war in Austria in 1934, moving then with Neurath (a prominent Social Democrat) and Arntz (who had allegiances to radical-left groups) to The Hague. In 1935 they began to use the name Isotype in the signature for their work. In 1940, as the German army invaded the Netherlands, Neurath and Reidemeister escaped to England, while Arntz stayed behind in The Hague. In 1941, after release from internment (as ‘enemy aliens’), Marie and Otto Neurath were married, and resumed their work in Oxford, founding the Isotype Institute. After Otto Neurath’s death in 1945, Marie Neurath carried on the work with a small number of English assistants, moving to London in 1948. After her retirement in 1971, she gave much energy to establishing a record of Otto Neurath’s life and work, and editing and translating his writings.

Gerrit Noordzij is one of the eminent Dutch graphic designers and (in all senses) writers. He has also been a path-breaking teacher at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where from 1970 to 1990 he directed the course in letter design. Among the students from his classes are some of the most distinguished Dutch type and graphic designers. As a writer of essays and books, his works include the bulletin Letterletter (reissued in book form in 2000), De handen van de zeven zusters (2000), and The stroke. For more, see this incomplete bibliography.

Norman Potter (1923–95) was an English cabinetmaker, designer, poet, and teacher. In the Second World War, and immediately afterwards, he acquired the skills of cabinetmaking; his life-long anarchist beliefs were also developed then. Through the 1950s he ran a workshop in Wiltshire, and began to work also as an ‘interior designer’ (a term he refused). In the 1960s he became a teacher, first at the Royal College of Art in London, then at the Construction School of the West of England College of Art, Bristol. After the first publication of What is a designer, he gave his energies increasingly to writing. His book Models & Constructs (1990) documented and reflected on his life & work.

Fred Smeijers is a Dutch type designer, teacher, and writer. After finishing as a student at the school of art at Arnhem, he worked as a typographic advisor to the reprographic company Océ, then became a founding member of the graphic design practice Quadraat, which provided the name for his first published typeface (FontShop, 1992). Smeijers has a whole range of distinctive typefaces to his credit, including Renard (The Enschedé Font Foundry, 1998) and Arnhem, Fresco, Sansa, and Custodia. These latter are all distributed by OurType, the company that he co-founded. His books are Counterpunch (1996) and Type now (2003). He is a winner of the Gerrit Noordzij prize (2001), and is Professor of Digital Typography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig.

Erik Spiekermann is a partner in United Designers in Berlin and San Francisco, and a writer at Spiekerblog. From 1979 to 2000 he was the leading figure in the design practice MetaDesign.

Paul Stiff teaches in the Department of Typography at the University of Reading, where, among other things, he runs the MA Information Design programme, directs the Optimism of modernity research project, and edits Typography papers. He was co-editor of Information Design Journal, with Rob Waller, from 1985 to 1989, and then editor until 2000.

The Department of Typography & Graphic Communication grew out of the Typography Unit, established by Michael Twyman first within, then outwith, the Fine Art Department at the University of Reading in the 1960s. In 1974 ‘the Unit’ was turned into ‘the Department’. At that time it could claim to be the only place in the UK (and elsewhere) in which to do typography at university level. Despite the subsequent proliferation of typography courses and universities, it remains a remarkable centre of typographic teaching and research.

Chris Villars works as an information technologist and gives his spare moments to music and painting. Born in Cambridge (UK), he studied philosophy at the University of Birmingham. He was one of the founding editors of the contemporary music magazine Contact. In 1997, he started the Morton Feldman Page, the website that has become the major online resource for anyone interested in Feldman and his music.

David Wild is an architect and writer. He studied architecture at Portsmouth, the Architectural Association in London, then worked for several firms before starting independent practice, teaching, and writing. He entered politics during the Vietnam war, producing and distributing 20,000 NLF flagbags to raise money for medical aid; designed and edited the outside-left architectural magazine ARse (1969–72), and designed the first Big Red Diary (1974). His practice has concentrated on domestic buildings, and his own self-built house in London is his best-known work. His photographs of the USA in the 1960s, taken while working there, have been widely published (Downbeat, Transaction, Paul Oliver’s Story of the blues). He writes critiques and reviews mainly for Architecture Today and Architects’ Journal.