Maximilien Vox

DANEL (L.) [Printers]. VOX (Maximilien) [Intro. & designer] Livret typographique. Établissements typographiques et lithographiques L. Danel. Lille, 1935. 4to. 30 cm. Pp. [iii], xvi, 183, [4], excluding section dividers. Some interior photos of the works. Orig. decorative boards, printed cover label, corners slightly worn, orig. glassine wrapper intact. Inscribed on half-title and rear inside endpaper. Striking title-page and some attractive deco touches in the geometric borders and tartan-like cover design. Very good. £175

Though Maximilien Vox (1894-1974, real name Samuel William Théodore Monod) is perhaps best known for devising, 1952-54, the Vox system of type classification - adopted, with some development, by ATypI in 1962, and in 1967 becoming the British Standard - his interests ranged widely, in the fields of literature, art history and publishing, and he had begun his career as a cartoonist, illustrator and journalist before taking up typography and graphic design in the 1920s. From 1928 he edited with A. M. Cassandre the Divertissements typographiques published by Deberny & Peignot. Something of an anglophile (he was partly of British descent), he illustrated a notable edition of Jane Austen, published by Dent, 1933-34.

The type specimen he designed in 1935 for the venerable French printing firm of L. Danel (f. 1698) ends with a four-page outline of the ‘art de reconnaitre un caractère’ according to the (serif-based) ‘principe de Thibaudeau’. The types preceding are arranged by Vox as follows: ‘caractères anciens’ (Venetians and Old Face), ‘modernes’ (mostly recent typefaces of a broadly transitional character), ‘classiques’ (Didones), ‘antiques’ (sans-serifs) and ‘divers’ (pretty much everything else, including slab-serifs, scripts, blackletter, non-Latins, etc.).

As he says in his introduction, ‘Je ne sais pas d’occupation plus charmante’ than leafing through a type specimen book. Who could possibly disagree with that?

 

 

Edward Johnston's type for the London Underground

 

[JOHNSTON (Edward)] Johnston Sans. Trial proofs. [London: I. M. Imprimit for] London Transport Museum, 1993.

   Privately printed in an edition of 14 numbered sets (4 on dampened Zerkall mould-made paper, 10 on cartridge), together with five sets, A-E, designated printer’s proofs.

   Broadsheets (25 ¼ x 17 ½”, 640 x 445mm) printed one side only. Title-page, edition details (colophon) and 25 sheets of type specimens. Sheet 1 shows the three sizes of cast metal type that were produced from Johnston’s design by Stevens, Shanks in the 1920s, and is printed from original foundry type. The remaining 24 sheets show wood type from 5-line pica to 24-line pica and are all printed from original wood type. Unbound sheets loose in a Solander box lined with beige Hannemuhle acid-free paper and covered in black Library buckram, printed label.

   Printer’s set D printed on cartridge paper, including additional items from the printer's archive as follows:

1  Early trial proof of two alphabets (10-line Pica and 8-line Pica) to check the condition of the wood type before printing began.

2  Early proof of 5-line Pica Medium and Bold printed on Moulin de Gue mould-made 300gsm paper to present to London Transport as a sample of how the wood types might be presented for the archive.

3  Proof of printer's first suggested text for title-page using 10-line, 6-line and 5-line pica wood type. The wording was revised and the title-page not used.

4  Grid overlay used as a guide to achieve optical centreing. 

5  Trial proof for Sheet 12: 12-line Pica Bold, with compositor's notes on spacing.

6  Two discarded sheets from first printings, containing wrong founts, which are explained in the list of archive material included. 

This is the last printer's archive set available for sale. £6950 

This private edition, of which only a single copy is in a UK public collection * – that donated by London Transport to the Johnston collection at the Ditchling Museum in Sussex – was designed to provide London Transport Executive and the London Transport Museum with a definitive record of the extant founts of the type designed by Edward Johnston in 1916 for London Underground. It shows this most celebrated of proprietary typefaces in its original form as it stood towards the end of the letterpress era, before Berthold Wolpe’s (unadopted) italic of 1973 and Walter Tracy’s amendments of 1974, and prior to the comprehensive re-evaluation and recreation of the face in the 1980s by the design consultants Banks & Miles, which resulted in New Johnston, still in use today.

   The proofs here were for the most part made from the collection of Johnston Sans wood letter originally held by the printers Howard Jones - one of four London printers who once maintained stock of the type – supplemented by some material from the London Transport Museum.

   A detailed comparison of the different printers’ holdings was impossible by the early 1990s. However, some information concerning the Bournehall Press collection was available to the printer, and London Transport specimens (albeit incomplete) of the stock of the two other printers who had held Johnston Sans, Roystan and Waterlow & Sons, were found and consulted. All this tended to confirm that the Howard Jones collection (now in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, the University of Reading) had survived in unusually good order. The process of ensuring the authenticity of the specimens and the exclusion of such wrong founts or poorly made sorts as may have been present in the cases, was aided during the printing by the assistance of Tim Demuth, an experienced user of Johnston Sans, from London Transport Advertising and Publicity department.

   These are authoritative proofs of a true design icon, arguably the first modern sanserif, and one of very few typefaces to enjoy widespread public recognition, and indeed affection. Johnston Sans is acknowledged today as embodying one of the most successful corporate identities ever created.

*Two copies are now in US libraries, the Houghton Library and Dallas Public Library, and there is a copy in the Lettering Archive, San Francisco.

   Justin Howes, Johnston’s Underground Type, Capital Transport Publishing, Harrow Weald, 2000

   Colin Banks, London’s Handwriting. The development of Edward Johnston’s Underground Railway block-letter. London Transport Museum, 1994

   Simon Garfield, Just My Type. A book about fonts. Profile Books, London, 2010, Chapter 8, ‘Tunnel Visions’, pp.114-128.