To understand the language and development of type is to know its history. Letter Forms is a collection of essays by and about Stanley Morison, adviser to Monotype, and the greatest type historian of
During his long career Stanley Morison held appointments as typographical adviser to Cambridge University Press, to the Monotype Corporation, and to The Times, where he was responsible both for its radical new design in 1932 and for the standard history of the paper. These two volumes bring together the majority of his most lasting essays. Many of them, pioneering in their day, are now classics in their field. The collection, first published in 1980, spans a period of forty years. It includes essays on letter-forms in manuscript and in print, beginning with those published in The Flueron in the 1920s, on typefaces in sixteenth-century Italy, on the development of Latin script, on the history of learned presses and on the typography of newspapers.
John Bell (1745–1831) was an English publisher. The Dictionary of National Biography has Charles Knight calling Bell a 'mischievous spirit, the very Puck of booksellers'. His 109-volume, literature-for-the-masses Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, which rivalled Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), was published from 1777 to 1783. Each volume cost just six shillings, at a time when similar volumes usually cost many times that. The drawings and illustrations with which Bell adorned his publications influenced later publishers, as did his abandonment of the long S. Most notable, perhaps, was Bell's joint-stock organisation of his publishing company, which defied 'the trade' – at the time, forty dominant publishing companies – in order to establish a monopoly on the best publications. In addition to the immense Poets of Great Britain, Bell also published similar volumes on Shakespeare and the British Theatre, as well as the Sunday newspa
Written by the respected typographer Stanley Arthur Morison (1889–1967), English Prayer Books examines the history of the various liturgical books used in public worship in England, from their origins in apostolic times to the later stages of their development in the middle of the twentieth century. Using the books themselves as the first source of critical enquiry, Morison draws attention to the rich history of change underlying church liturgies and throws light on a subject too often neglected in the study of Christian sacred texts.
Dawks is the name of a family of booksellers and printers who practised their craft in London during the seventeenth century and later. The younger Thomas Dawks was honoured with the title of 'His Majesty's Printer for the British Language' in 1676. Ichabod Dawks, 'honest Ichabod' as Steel called him, and the best-known member of the family, published Dawks's NewsLetter on the evenings of Post Nights (i.e. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday) from 1696 to 1716. For this periodical a special script type in imitation of handwriting was used, the matrices of which have recently been identified. Mr Morison's account of the Dawkses, based upon a family diary which he lately discovered, enlarges at several points our knowledge of their respective careers, and, in the case of Ichabod, demonstrates the character of his contribution to the progress of English journalism. Illustrated with type facsimiles, line blocks and nine pages of collotype facsimiles of newsletters.
The text of The English Newspaper is substantially that given as a series of six lectures in the Sandars Readership in Bibliography in February 1932, a post that Stanley Morison held at Cambridge University from 1931–2. He based most of his research on original sources from, among others, the British Museum, the Bodleian and University Libraries. His aim was to stimulate interest in the bibliographical history of newspaper development, despite this form being 'essentially ephemeral', which 'yet has a place, though humble, beside the cocdex and the printed book - the most permanent of records of human thought and experience'.
