Lifehacker posted some nice photos of the Moleskine office in Milan and a new one in New York. Very nice. Perhaps after they’ve settled into their New York office, they could consider a new approach to the choice of type for their datebooks… The use of Rotis has had a good run. To be honest, it kind of feels like I’m writing in Ozzy Osbourne’s spell book. A more neutral face would do wonders for the experience.

Nothing’s worse than researching an arcane topic, only to scan down over forums and long posts to unanswered questions. That’s what it must have been like in 1896 to read The Inland Printer’s column on designers and engravers of type because, for technical limitations, none of the work of these designers could be shown.

This column was created by William E. Loy, a San Franciscan printing equipment salesman and scholar. For three years Loy compiled through correspondence the biographies, photographs of the artists, and lists of the type they designed or cut.

As we’d imagine Loy would have wanted it, Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type compiles all of both the bios and type (over 800 faces) into one book. It’s good for an historical log and a fascinating view of type design trends of the time.

Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type

By Loy E. William

Edited by Alastair M. Johnston & Stephen O. Saxe

Published in New Castle, Delaware by Oak Knoll Press

First Edition 2009

Hardcover with Dust Jacket

9 × 12 inches

164 Pages

Typeset in Electra, Designed by William Addison Dwiggins and issued by Linotype in 1935
ISBN 978–1–58456–261–0
$59.95

From Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook comes Unit Editions, a south London publishing company producing books on design and visual culture.

Multi award winning Tony Brook is known for work produced through his design studio Spin. Much of the work has been exhibited globally and documented in many publications including Graphic Design for the 21st Century. Tony is president of the UK chapter of AGI.

Adrian Shaughnessy has authored many titles including How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul and Graphic Design: A User’s Manual. He is also host of the internet radio show Graphic Design on the Radio.

I talked with Adrian Shaughnessy to get up to speed with what’s in store at Unit Editions.

Theo Rosendorf: What topics does Unit Editions deal in?

Adrian Shaughnessy: Our ambition is to produce books on a wide variety of topics relating to graphic design and visual culture. I can’t see us producing books on how to use software packages, but I’d hate to rule out any topic that was of interest to designers.

Amongst other things, we have an ambition to publish books on historical subjects. There is a disconnect when it comes to design history. If you talk to mainstream publishers – even those with extensive back catalogues of design books – they will tell you that historical subjects don’t sell. We’re not convinced. I think the failure of historical titles has got more to do with the way publishers put these books together: they are often badly designed and written purely for an academic audience. Dull, in a word.

Poor sales can’t be because there isn’t any interest in the history of graphic design. Look at the internet – it’s stuffed with examples of historical material. One of the ways we’ve driven people to the Unit Editions website is through a Flickr site that Tony has been building up. He is a collector and has an archive of fantastic journals, magazines, books and posters by Swiss, Dutch, German, and American designers. From time to time he dips into this trove and plucks out a few unseen gems and posts them on Flikr. The effect is astonishing. Within minutes people are responding – and many of these hardcore design fans find their way onto the Unit site.

Besides historical subjects, we want to look at the contemporary scene, too. We’ve got an important book lined up for next year that we’ll be announcing soon. The subject matter is contemporary, but we want to show that what is cool and vibrant now often has links with what was cool and vibrant in the past – so the book will encompass the contemporary and the historical.

We’re also committed to publishing books by designers and writers we admire. We want other voices and other opinions to enter the Unit bloodstream. But whatever we do, our books will always be characterised by superb design and production. Each of our books will be an embodiment of the ethos that underpins Unit – namely that design is our paramount, first and number one concern.

Read the full Q&A at Type Desk: Unit Editions Makes Books for Designers

While attending the Type Directors Club Book Fair this past May, I had the pleasure of speaking with Doug Clouse about his new book Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan: Typographic Tastemakers of the Late Nineteenth Century. It’s a full-length study of the American type foundry, Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan. Doug told me about his research, his work into the book’s design, and his travels and discoveries along the way. Having a slight fetish for historical analysis of type, I had to read it. Plus, it’s aptly named with Typographic Tastemakers. Though not the intention of the title, cats in Williamsburg would give their Brooks saddle to set their next tattoo in an original Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan face.

The beginning of the text gets straight down to historical facts of Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan (MS&J) being a descendant of the first successful American type foundry, Binny and Ronaldson (established 1796) that later merged with American Type Founders in 1892. Though it’s not these broad facts that pull you in, but the extensive historical documentation of how the business was run and how its type evolved over time. MS&J kept thorough business records of which Doug has masterfully pieced together to give a complete picture of MS&J’s business and how its type evolved and impacted society at the time.

To document this story, the book employs maps of real estate, architectural drawings of the foundries, photographs of tools and and factory floors, and a completely illustrated appendix of MS&J’s patented typefaces. The appendix contains lots of type specimens. I imagine much of Doug’s work was done managing this large collection. To quote Doug, “Studies of typefaces tend towards classification and issues of provenance, since the first step in understanding them is sorting them. Despite the tendency for their obvious utility to overshadow their expressiveness, typefaces are design, and their history is a sort of design history, a chronological succession of forms set against economic and social backgrounds.”

Some interesting bits:

• The photos show MS&J’s factory floors filled with mostly boys and just a few men. Initially, the boys were assigned simple tasks like rubbing burrs off newly cast type. Later they graduated to tasks performed by the trained men. Women were employed in the correspondence and administrative offices.

• The American point system of type size adopted in 1886 was based on MS&J’s pica point.

• MS&J sold type by the pound. They sold fonts varying in size from twenty five to thousands of pounds, depending on the needs of the customer.

Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan was typeset in the following faces:

Principal text: Documenta, designed by Frank E. Blokland in 1986
Captions: Kievit, designed by Michael Abbink in 2001
Running Feet: Centennial Script, designed by Herman Ihlenburg in 1875 and redrawn by Rebecca Alaccari of Canada Type in 2007
Folios: Numbers Depot, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones in 2006

The book is 176 pages, casebound with a dust jacket, and measures 8.5 × 11 inches.

Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan: Typographic Tastemakers of the Late Nineteenth Century
Written & Designed by Doug Clouse
First Edition 2008
Published in New Castle, Delaware by Oak Knoll Press
ISBN 978–1–58456–232–0
$65.00