Typography Tuesday
This week we present a few typographical examples from Printer’s Abecedarium by the American artist, designer, and educator John O. C. McCrillis who died last year at the age of 103. In the forward to this book, Dale Roylance, a curator of graphic art at both Yale University and Princeton University, writes:
The durable appeal of alphabet books has also resulted in a great many properly sober A to Z correlations for almost every area of learning from Authors to Zoology. It is highly appropriate that the history of the art of printing should also have its alphabet book. John McCrillis, in his Printer’s Abecedarium, has pursued the idea to create his own alphabetical Pantheon of great printers. . . . Each Gothic letter has been freely adapted from the illuminated initials found in the Yale Library copy of the Catholicon, thought to have been printed by Gutenberg at Mainz in 1460. The resulting McCrillis design is a triumphal exercise in the revival of letter forms. In significant addition to its abbreviated dictionary of printers from Aldus to Zainer, the McCrillis Abecedarium gives us a latter-day calligraphic model book, masterfully printed and worthy of its fine fifteenth-century inspiration.
The letters shown here are A for famed Venetian printer/publisher Aldus Manutius (1450-1515); B for Birmingham typographer, printer, and innovator John Baskerville (1706-1775); C for the first printer in England William Caxton (c. 1422-1491), but it could just as well be for the designer of the first truly notable English type William Caslon (c. 1693-1766); K for the early Nuremberg printing magnate Anton Koberger (c. 1445-1513); P for Officina Plantiniana in Antwerp, founded by the Frenchman Christophe Plantin (c. 1520 - 1589) and continued by the Moretus family; W for William Caxton’s successor Wynken de Worde (died c. 1534); Z for the first printer in Augsburg Gunther Zainer (died 1478).
Printer’s Abecedarium was published in Boston by David R. Godine in 1974. The text for the book was hand-set in 18 point Inkunabula type, designed by Raffaello Bertieri in 1921 and released by Nebiolo, and the two-color initials, designed by John McCrillis, were reproduced the same size as the originals. The book was designed by the author and printed on Mohawk Superfine softwhite by The Meriden Gravure Company. Our copy, once again a donation from our good friend Jerry Buff, bears the bookplate of Marcus Allen McCorison, who was the long-time director of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.
View our other Typography Tuesday posts.
