dot-font: True to Type, the Autobiography

John D. Berry

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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.  If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here.  You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

Ruari McLean has written some of the best books about typography—that is, designing with type—in the English language. His excellent contribution to Thames & Hudson’s series of intelligent manuals for students and others, “The Thames & Hudson Manual of Typography,” originally published in 1980, is still in print and still widely read, even though no effort has been made to update it for the computer era. Some of the tools we use may have changed, but the approach to them, and the approach to the problem each job presents, are very much the same. And McLean’s 1975 book, “Jan Tschichold: Typographer,” is the best introduction to the work and thinking of one of the 20th century’s most fascinating and infuriating typographers. (McLean’s newer version, “Jan Tschichold: a Life in Typography,” is easier to find today.)

Now, near the end of his career, Ruari McLean has written his own tale, in “True to Type: A Typographical Autobiography,” published by Oak Knoll Press in the United States and Werner Shaw in the UK. It gives a particularly colorful and personal impression of the ferment in graphic design and publishing in London in the 1950s and ’60s.

At the Heart of It All

Scottish-born but largely raised in Oxford, McLean spent the busiest part of his career in and around London, where in the early 1950s he seemed to have a finger in every pie. (Indeed, one of his chapters is entitled, “1951 and all that”—1951 being the year of the great post-war Festival of Britain, which, as McLean says, “had been planned, since 1947, ostensibly to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but with the real aim of saying ‘Cheer up, Britain, the war’s over, let’s enjoy ourselves.'”) He worked for an ad agency for a time, but his real love was books, and there was a market then for new approaches to publishing. His partnership with George Rainbird (as Rainbird, McLean Ltd, founded in 1951) produced a wide range of finely designed books that helped set the standards for British publishing at the time. As Colin Banks, who was close to the business though not in it, puts it in his Foreword, “I had an intimate retrospective of how they drove a vision of well-illustrated books that was at that time beyond the wit of established publishers to do themselves… Rainbird, McLean Ltd has to bear the sneer of ‘Coffee table books,’ but they more than anyone forced the book trade to respect and pay for design: not easy!”

Title-page opening for one of the earliest Rainbird, McLean books, “Southall,” 1951.

At the same time, McLean was designing and overseeing the production of the illustrated children’s magazine the “Eagle,” fondly remembered by many who grew up in Britain in the 1950s. (The “Eagle” featured the comic strip “Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future,” and was meant to be a British answer to the American comic books that were then flooding the market.)

Tales of the City

“True to Type” is largely anecdotal, and McLean is comfortable telling about the personalities, the incidents, and the foibles of the publishing world of the time. His work put him in a position to get to know a lot of the best artists, the most notable writers, and even sometimes the political figures of Britain. He describes, for instance, meeting the painter Lucian Freud when he stopped by at deadline time to pick up a cartoon that Freud had promised for a proposed new Sunday newspaper: “I had never met Lucian, and was not prepared for what eventually opened the door, obviously straight out of bed: a figure with a haggard face, terrifying staring eyes, hair standing on end, and wearing a woman’s summer frock.” (The drawing wasn’t done.) Another time, when he had been appointed Hon. Typographic Advisor to HMSO (the government printing office), he describes finding himself in the odd position of being the only person with both the technical knowledge and the hierarchical status (as an “advisor”) to explain to the Foreign Secretary why HMSO wanted to redesign British passports in a more modern style: “The only person supposed to be capable of explaining, and permitted to meet the Foreign Secretary as an equal, was me.” (The titular head of the printing office was a political appointee who knew nothing about printing or design; the person whose department was actually undertaking the redesign, John Westwood, “knew all the answers, but it was not possible for him to speak to a Minister because he, John, was only a junior civil servant.” Sometimes being on the outside of an organization is a considerable advantage.)

By Word and Example

McLean is forthright in his advocacy of good typography—which is to say, good graphic design, with respect for the words, integration of the art, and a detailed knowledge of what’s needed to achieve a result. He may be occasionally self-indulgent in telling his stories, but that’s built into the nature of a memoir—and if you care about the subject at all, it’s enjoyable as well as informative. (Before reading this book, I didn’t realize just how many areas McLean has worked in, even though I was very familiar with his writing and a small part of his book design.)

McLean was one of the main people responsible for reviving interest in the fine printing and exuberant design of Victorian publishing, and he published several books of his own on the subject. He both edited and designed the magazine “Motif,” published by James Shand of the Shenval Press, with its unique blend of literature, fine printing, type, photography, architecture, sculpture, and painting. “I was empowered to pay contributors—not much, but something—but far more important was the fact that we could offer artists pages of white paper on which we could print, in colour or black-and-white and in the finest quality, anything they chose to draw,” wrote McLean. “That was something they could not get anywhere else at that time.”

He also designed a number of other magazines, including the mass-market “Picture Post,” and was asked to write a book on contemporary magazine design (“Magazine Design,” Oxford University Press, 1969), which was “the first book on the subject, as far as I know, in any language.”

Jan Tschichold

In the late ’40s, McLean worked at Penguin Books in the office next to Jan Tschichold, who had been brought in to shape up the design and production of Penguins after war-time laxity. McLean had known Tschichold before the war, but their working relationship really dated from this period at Penguin. As a result, McLean translated several of Tschichold’s earlier books, which had never been published in English, though it still took several years for any of them to see print. The first was “Asymmetric Typography,” (originally “Typographische Gestaltung”), which was published in Switzerland in 1935 as “Typographische Gestaltung” but didn’t see the light of English-language day until 1967.

McLean later translated Tschichold’s early seminal work, “Die neue Typographie,” which had been largely responsible for spreading the ideas of the revolutionary New Typography in Germany in the 1920s. Tschichold had wanted to make the English edition a new version, adapted to a British and American audience and including his own insights and second thoughts on the fiery pronouncements of his younger self. Surprisingly, there was no publisher interested in the translation when it was finished, before Tschichold’s death in 1974, but two decades later it finally came out from the University of California Press. A German facsimile edition had been published by Brinkmann & Bose in 1987, and interest among graphic designers was high. “California, however,” says McLean, “decided that they should publish it as an exact and complete translation of the original text; not the new edition Jan had had in mind, but as a work of historical scholarship. This meant that I had to make a virtually new translation, word for word, but we included Jan’s priceless comments on himself as notes. ‘The New Typography‘ was published in 1995.”

The Good Book

As you might expect, “True to Type” is a well-designed book, inviting to hold and to read. Although it’s largely text, the photographs, drawings, and reproductions of various covers and other designs are integrated so gracefully that it’s only when you flip through the pages from end to end that you realize how many there really are. Although McLean didn’t design the interior (he did do the dust jacket), it’s very much in his style. The text typeface is John Hudson’s Manticore, and naturally there is a note about the type at the beginning of the book. Manticore is a Venetian-style typeface, but not a historical revival; it’s more compact than Nicholas Jenson‘s famous types, and it has a fairly upright italic that stands out nicely in text. Manticore is “an attempt to capture the aesthetic and calming balance between black type and cream paper achieved by the Renaissance printers in the early days of printing.” It has been used here quite well; the pages are pleasing to look at and comfortable to read. As suits the subject and its author, “True to Type” is an example of good book typography.

McLean explains the importance of his subject cogently in his Preface; it will also serve as a reason why this and his other books about typography and typographers should be read:

“The design of printed matter affects, in one way or another, everyone, whether they can read or not. The appreciation of it may give pleasure, the more it is understood, to every educated person; it affects, powerfully and commercially, every business man besides those whose province it most directly is, printers and publishers. To put it at its simplest, nearly everyone in civilized countries must at some time in his or her life be concerned with the production of some piece of printed matter. The art of printing, which is the same as that of typography, is no longer a mystery: It is largely a matter of common sense; what is involved can be appreciated by anyone. Typography, like architecture, surrounds all of us: we should look at it critically, not ignore it.”