1.
Industrial Revolution
The invention of the steam engine and it's application to manufacturing in the late 18th and early 19th century resulted in a shift from individual pride in craftsmanship to the de-humanized division of labor. Machine production and advances in agricultural methods displaced thousands who then flocked to the cities to find work in factories. Worker homes were mostly slums and young children were pressed into 12 hour work days in deplorable conditions.

Many critics of this new industrialized society advocated for the rights of workers and the return to a connection between the individual craftsman and their work.

2.
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations 1851
London, England
Conceived to exhibit the industrial, economic and military advances of England, the popular success of this event was dampened by the less than enthusiastic reviews by critics. The work created by the new industrialized methods proved to be shoddy and of poor design.
The Victorian propensity for over-decoration which combined a hodgepodge of unrelated styles was now seen as symptomatic of an tasteless and over-capitalistic society.

3.
The Grammar of Ornament
Owen Jones, 1856
In response to the call for better quality in design, Owen Jones published an inventory of international and historical decorative styles. Printed in colorful lithographs, the book includes 20 sections of illustrated motifs and Jones's 27 Propositions on what makes good design.

Proposition 5
Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed."That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful."

Proposition 37
No improvement can take place in the Art of the present generation until all classes, Artists, Manufacturers, and the Public, are better educated in Art, and the existence of general principles is more fully recognized.

5.
The PreRaphaelite Brotherhood
Toward the middle of the 19th century, a small group of young artists in England reacted against what they felt was "the frivolous art of the day": They deeply admired the simplicities of the early 15th century and wanted to bring English art back to a greater "truth to nature."

While critics and art historians worshiped Raphael as the great master of the Renaissance, these young students rebelled against what they saw as Raphael's theatricality and the Victorian hypocrisy and pomp of the academic art tradition. The friends decided to form a secret society, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to emulate Renaissance painting before Raphael developed his grand manner. They adopted a high moral stance that embraced a sometimes unwieldy combination of symbolism and realism, religious or romantic subjects with an insistence on painting everything from direct observation.

6.
William Morris
Several members of the PreRapahelite Brotherhood, Dante Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris brought the themes of medievalism into the soon to emerge Arts and Crafts Movement.

"To members of the Arts & Crafts, the Industrial Revolution separated humans from their own creativity and individualism; the worker was a cog in the wheel of progress, living in an environment of shoddy machine-made goods, based more on ostentation than function. These proponents sought to reestablish the ties between beautiful work and the worker, returning to an honesty in design not to be found in mass-produced items. In both Britain and America the movement relied on the talent and creativity of the individual craftsman and attempted to create a total environment."

Excerpt from http://anc.gray-cells.com/Intro.html

7.
Morris & Co
Unhappy with the quality of products available for furnishing his newly designed home, Red House, Morris created his own wallpaper, tapestries and furniture. "He then set up a studio in 1861 with several associates, including architect Philip Webb and English artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1875 he reorganized the partnership into Morris & Co. Morris' designed were realistic. He pulled from the nature around him as did the medieval tapestry artists before him.... He traditional methods, often obtaining dyes from vegetables. He perfected the use of woodblocks for printing wallpaper and textiles.The idea of the house as a total work of art, with all of the interior objects designed by the architect, emerged from this studio and remained standard practice throughout the Arts and Crafts movement."
As part of his attempt to reintroduce handmade quality Morris used only natural dyes and hand production processes. His refusal to use modern production techniques meant that his products were only affordable by the rich, anathema to his socialist beliefs.

8. The Kelmscott Press
1890
William Morris established the most famous of the private presses, the Kelmscott Press, at Hammersmith in January, 1891. Between then and 1898, the press produced 53 books (totaling some 18,000 copies). Kelmscott was the culmination of Morris's life as a craftsman in many diverse fields. He set out to prove that the high standards of the past could be repeated - even surpassed - in the present. The books Morris produced were medieval in design, modeled on his studies of the incunabula of the fifteenth century.

Noteworthy for their harmony of type and illustration, Morris' main priority was to have each book seen a a whole: this included taking painstaking care with all aspects of production, including the paper, the form of type, the spacing of the letters, and the position of the printed matter on the page. Kelmscott books re-awakened the ideals of book design and inspired better standards of production at a time when the printed page was generally at its poorest.
Morris was fascinated with the medieval era, designing and writing books inspired by that time period. (His books were the direct inspiration for Tolkein's The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings).

The Type

Eschewing industrialized processes, Morris designed and produced his own typefaces, manufactured his own paper, and printed using a handpress. His books were designed to be read slowly, to be appreciated, to be treasured, and thus made an implicit statement about the ideal relationships which ought to exist between the reader, the text, and the author — a statement which we have, by and large, continued to ignore.

Troy, Chaucer, Golden

Morris's roman 'Golden' type was inspired by type face of the early printer Nicolas Jenson of Venice. Troy (above left) is based upon studies of manuscript blackletter. The versions shown here are digital recreations of Morris's type. Remember that digital designers often try to emulate the ink spread and paper surface from historical letterpress work to recreate the character of the original printed type, rather than the actual type design.

Ashendene Printers Mark

11.Doves Press
1900
"The Doves press was in direct reaction to Morris's strongly decorative approach to bookmaking. Cobden-Sanderson, with Emery Walker the proprietor of the press, was a difficult, demanding and highly idealistic man. He was a great bookbinder, and designer of bookbindings who had bound for Morris. For all the superb ornamentation of his bindings, he chose an austere approach in his printing. The typeface he designed... was also based on Jenson, but it was as if he had looked at an entirely different book from Morris. Where Morris's face was rather heavy, with comparatively short ascenders and descenders crowned with strong serifs, Cobden-Sanderson's version was much lighter in feel. The punches and matrices of this typeface ended up at the bottom of the Thames, for Cobden-Sanderson could not bear the thought of anyone else using them, even his partner."

9.
Golden Cockerel Press
England, 1920
The Golden Cockerel Press distinguished itself not only for its high quality of printing but for the rich wood cuts by various artists including Eric Gill. The masterpiece of the Press is the Four Gospels, which used Gill's wood cut illustrations as well as his type face design.

10.
Ashendene Press
England, 1895 - 1935
Wealthy book publisher St. John Hornby founded this small private press. Most Ashendene editions used a trademark font: Subiaco, which was based on a 15th century semi-humanistic Italian type made by Sweynheim and Pannartz in Subiaco, Italy

The American Private Press

New Fairfield, Conn.: Bruce Rogers, 1957.
8vo; Goudy Thirty type; 300 copies. Large roundel by Valenti Angelo in red over gold on opening text page

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12.
Bruce Rogers
Riverside Press, 1895 - 1912

In 1895 Rogers began work at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts and appointed as head of the department responsible for the production of limited-edition books in 1900. The freedom of constraints on his budget and time allowed the production of some notable books

Roger's masterpiece, The Bible for Oxford University Press, was completed in 1935. A lectern sized format, the pages measured 12 x 16 inches. The type is a special version of Centaur, 22 points, set on a 19 point body so as to save space. The type was set using Monotype's typecasting machine, in a pioneering demonstration that beautiful, well-designed books could be produced using modern methods.

"In 1903 Mr. Goudy acquired a partner, $300 in capital, 150 pounds of type, and he set up the Village Press in Park Ridge, Illinois. An essay by William Morris was the first book he printed. The press was moved a number of times, from Illinois to Hingham, Massachusetts, to New York City. Goudy's wife Bertha eventually took the partner's place and learned to set type by hand. By the time of her death in 1935 she was an expert typesetter.

The Goudys faced continual financial difficulties even though Goudy won the bronze medal given at the St. Louis World's Fair for book printing in 1904. Fire destroyed the Parker Building and the Village Press in 1908. The Village Press was rebuilt in Forest Hills, Queens, on Deepdene Road where it remained until 1924, when Goudy moved it to Marlboro, New York.

While at Forest Hills, Goudy earned his world-wide reputation as a type designer. During this period he sold eight new type faces to the famous Caslon Foundry in England. He also designed two of his greatest types for Mitchell Kennerley: Kennerley and Forum Title.

Taken from
An Interview with Matthew Carter
By: Mark Solsburg

14.
Q. Is there a seminal event that marked the beginning of 20th century typography in America?
A. I would say that the most important event occurred just before the turn of the century in 1892 when the American Type Founders Company (ATF) was formed through a merger of 23 of the country´s most prominent type foundries. Until then, most big American cities had at least one type foundry to service the local newspapers and printers. These foundries designed their own typefaces and liberally copied each other.

Q. What prompted the major American foundries to merge?
A. ... a Milwaukee engineer named Linn Boyd Benton put the first “nail in the coffin” of local foundries in 1884 when he invented a pantographic punchcutter, a router-like engraving machine for cutting the steel punches for type. That was the most important technical development in typography since Gutenberg´s invention of variable-width type molds in the 15th century.
A pantograph used for drawing from Diderot's Encyclopedie.

16. Monotype
Tolbert Lanston of Washington, D.C., invented the Monotype, which cast individual letters through a machine-driven process. These advances reduced the need for foundry type since brass matrices didn't wear out as quickly. To survive the inroads made by Linotype and Monotype, ATF was formed to supply precast metal type nationwide.

Stanley Morison and Monotype
"From 1923 to 1967 Morison was typographic consultant for the Monotype Corporation. In the 1920s and 1930s, his work at Monotype included research and adaptation of historic typefaces, including the revival of the Baskerville and Bembo types. He pioneered the great expansion of the company's range of typefaces and hugely influenced the field of typography to the present day."
A typographer, scholar, and historian of printing, Morison is particularly remembered for his design of Times New Roman, later called "the most successful new typeface of the first half of the 20th century".
He was inspired by William Morris' ideals of quality but at the same time aware of the need to adapt them to the new mass-production techniques

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