Curwen Press — Type Faces in Use at the Curwen Press, Together with a Selection of Printer’s Flowers, Swelled Rules, Vignettes, Borders, etc. — 1957

Title: Type Faces in Use at the Curwen Press, Together with a Selection of Printer’s Flowers, Swelled Rules, Vignettes, Borders, etc.
Publisher / Printer: The Curwen Press, North Street, Plaistow, London E13
Date: 1957
Edition: First edition
Format: Quarto
Pagination: 12 pages
Stock Code: 004193
Location: Ephemera Drawer, Bookroom
Sleeve: Design A

First edition of this handsome and highly characteristic 1957 Curwen Press type specimen, issued from the Press at North Street, Plaistow, and designed to demonstrate the range of typefaces, borders, printer’s flowers, rules and decorative devices then available to its compositors and designers. Far more than a utilitarian trade list, it is itself an elegant piece of mid-century British printing and typography, combining practical reference with the decorative inventiveness for which Curwen had become famous.

The front wrapper is particularly striking, printed in black and turquoise with a dense arrangement of repeated floral and ornamental borders surrounding a restrained central title panel. The wrapper identifies one of the principal faces used in the design as Grangewood 34/11 (4 lines), making the publication not merely a catalogue of type but a demonstration of the material it records.

Internally, the booklet presents a wide selection of display types, including Fat Face, Fry’s Ornamented, Old Face Open Titling, Figgins Shaded, Bodoni Bold, Ultra Bodoni, Elongated Roman, Elongated Shaded, Albertus, Chisel, Maximilian, Vesta, Orplid, Ornata Type, Cable Heavy, Gill Sans, Van Krimpen Open, Perpetua Bold, Perpetua Titling and Times display faces. The typographic specimens are printed with clarity and variety, allowing direct comparison of letterforms and reflecting both traditional display typography and the modern British types of the inter-war and post-war period.

The later pages are devoted to printer’s ornaments and decorative material, including selections of borders from Typefounders and Monotype, printer’s flowers, swelled rules and an especially attractive series of vignettes. The final page is dated “The Curwen Press · 1957”, providing an unequivocal contemporary printing date.

The publication is particularly significant in the history of British graphic design because the Curwen Press occupied a central position in twentieth-century printing, illustration and commercial art. Under Harold Curwen and Oliver Simon, the Press developed a reputation for unusually close collaboration between printer, designer and artist. Its work became associated with many of the outstanding names in modern British illustration and design, including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Paul Nash, John Nash, Barnett Freedman, Graham Sutherland and Edward Ardizzone.

The decorative material represented here was an important part of that visual identity. Curwen’s compositors and designers used type ornaments, borders and specially commissioned devices not merely as embellishment but as structural elements of page design. The present specimen therefore provides a particularly useful primary document for the working vocabulary of the Curwen Press in the late 1950s, showing the actual type and ornament resources available within the printing works.

The date is also significant. Published in 1957, this specimen belongs to the closing phase of the period during which the Curwen Press at Plaistow remained one of Britain’s most distinctive commercial and fine printers. It predates the establishment of the Curwen Studio in the following decade and documents the Press’s typographic resources immediately before the revival of artist lithography that would become another major chapter in the Curwen story.

The present example is in very good indeed condition, with slight creasing and rubbing consistent with its original working and promotional purpose. The wrappers remain attractive and the internal specimens are clean, bright and sharply printed. Now housed in a clear acetate sleeve, Design A, for protection.

A particularly attractive and bibliographically useful example of Curwen Press ephemera, combining type specimen, trade catalogue and accomplished graphic design, and providing direct evidence of the typography and decorative material available to one of the most influential British printing houses of the twentieth century.

Stock code: 004193. Location: Ephemera Drawer, Bookroom. Sleeve Design A.

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