In his admirable foreword to Lettering of Today, Dr. Eberhard Holscher has dealt most authoritatively with the principles of hand lettering and its raison d'être. This volume, first published in 1937 and several times revised, has become a reference book for students, established calligraphers, designers and craftsmen all over the world, and we venture to believe has had an influence far beyond the hopes of those responsible for its creation.

This new book, Modern Lettering and Calligraphy, contains examples of work pro­duced from 1945 to the present time, thereby continuing the story from Lettering of Today. Some of the calligraphic examples bear witness to the teaching of the late Edward Johnston, whose students, while revering his memory, have developed their own "handwriting" in a style sufficiently distinguished as to be obvious of authorship to the lettering expert.

The tools of the lettering craftsman, be he calligrapher, painter or stone-mason, have not changed with the years, but the form of the letters and the execution—particularly in architecture—have moved with the times, and we find neon strip, plastic and other materials providing; new methods of attracting public attention and new problems for the lettering craftsman to solve. Whether the public fully appre­ciate the immense use which is made of the drawn letter is a debatable point, for whether ultimately printed, painted or rendered into metal or stone, the original is the work of an artist, call himself what he will.

As in Lettering of Today this volume has been divided into four sections, each selected by a practising craftsman in his own particular sphere. Mr. Mervyn C. Oliver is a member of the Council of The Craft Centre of Great Britain, the Society of Scribes & Illuminators, The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society and The Art Workers' Guild, a teacher at the L.C.C. Central School of Arts & Crafts, and his reputation as an outstanding calligrapher is well known. He designed two inscrip­tions which were engraved on the Stalingrad Sword, and is now engaged in writing MS. Memorial Books and Commendation Certificates for St. James's Palace, the Admiralty, etc. The examples of calligraphy in this book begin with Brief Script and Chancery Hands, and proceed from informal hands—including one by an Indian schoolboy at Harrow where the Italic hand is now being adopted as the basic style—to illustrations of a wide variety of fine manuscript writing, mainly on vellum. It will be observed that Mr. Oliver has rightly chosen examples in which lettering is the main feature, in preference to those in which decoration predominates.

Mr. Ruari McLean, who contributes the Book Production section, is a book designer who started his career in the Shakespeare Head Press, Oxford, under Bernard H. Newdigate. After the war for three years he lectured on typography and book design at the Royal College of Art in London and is the author of Modern Book Design, published by The British Council. To the purist, the employment of a lettering artist as embellisher of a machine-made product may be absurd, particularly in view of the vast number of interesting type faces available, but the fact remains that a drawn letter is exclusive whereas a type face may be seen in any context, nor indeed is it yet a mechanical possibility to produce a script type in which each word has an unbroken continuity of line. As Mr. McLean's illustrations demonstrate, the lettering artist's activities in book production are in the main concerned with the design of preliminary pages and bindings and with book jackets, where the force of impact makes or kills the book's prospect of successful sale.

Mr. George Mansell, who writes on Lettering in Association with Architecture, is a designer of lettering for many different purposes, and was for many years a partner and manager of the Dorian Workshop & Studio. He has held teaching appointments at Putney, St. Martin's, Harrow and Hornsey Schools of Art, and is at present part-time lecturer on Lettering and Layout at the two last-named schools. He, too, has selected examples where the emphasis is on lettering in preference to architectural decoration, and shows the infinite variety of ways in which the artist is employed for inscription on materials of widely different characteristics. How many of them, unhappily, pass unnoticed by the public.

The last section, Lettering in Advertising, is the selection of Mr. Frederick A. Horn, himself a designer and typographer (his jacket design adorns this book) and Art Director of T. Booth Waddicor & Partners Ltd. His commentary is a breath of fresh air on a warm day and contains much common-sense. Judged on quantity and finance, advertisers are probably the largest buyers of the lettering artist's work, and that produced for commercial purposes has earned its place in any book on lettering, side by side with the work of fine manuscript writers.

Within the limitations of these four sections will be found a wide selection of representative examples of lettering of today. Beyond these limits there are of course many other uses of lettering, particularly those in which the miniature or illustration plays a major decorative role. To cover them all with any degree of thoroughness is beyond the scope of one volume and we hope that our readers will agree that in choosing a smaller field we have been able to produce a more valuable work.

THE EDITORS

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