Stanley Morison – författare

The Tally of Types was first circulated in a privately printed edition in 1953, achieving a fame and influence wholly disproportionate to the comparatively small number of copies in existence. In 1973 Cambridge University Press published a version edited and expanded by Brooke Crutchley and others, making this classic of typographical history and practice available to a wider readership; it is this edition we have reprinted here. Stanley Morison provided the impetus and judgement behind the programme of typographical revival carried through by the Monotype Corporation in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Tally is an account, historical, critical and functional, of the types cut under Morison's direction during this period. It is an impressive performance: a fine example of what is now recognised as Morison's characteristic blend of erudition and insight. What started as no more than an attempt to record the facts developed, under his hand, into one of the major statements of typographical practice of its time.

The text of The English Newspaper is substantially that given as a series of six lectures in the Sandars Readership in Bibliography in February 1932, a post that Stanley Morison held at Cambridge University from 1931-2. He based most of his research on original sources from, among others, the British Museum, the Bodleian and University Libraries. His aim was to stimulate interest in the bibliographical history of newspaper development, despite this form being 'essentially ephemeral', which 'yet has a place, though humble, beside the cocdex and the printed book - the most permanent of records of human thought and experience'.

Written by the respected typographer Stanley Arthur Morison (1889-1967), English Prayer Books examines the history of the various liturgical books used in public worship in England, from their origins in apostolic times to the later stages of their development in the middle of the twentieth century. Using the books themselves as the first source of critical enquiry, Morison draws attention to the rich history of change underlying church liturgies and throws light on a subject too often neglected in the study of Christian sacred texts.

John Bell (1745-1831) was an English publisher. The Dictionary of National Biography has Charles Knight calling Bell a 'mischievous spirit, the very Puck of booksellers'. His 109-volume, literature-for-the-masses Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, which rivalled Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), was published from 1777 to 1783. Each volume cost just six shillings, at a time when similar volumes usually cost many times that. The drawings and illustrations with which Bell adorned his publications influenced later publishers, as did his abandonment of the long S. Most notable, perhaps, was Bell's joint-stock organisation of his publishing company, which defied 'the trade' - at the time, forty dominant publishing companies - in order to establish a monopoly on the best publications. In addition to the immense Poets of Great Britain, Bell also published similar volumes on Shakespeare and the British Theatre, as well as the Sunday newspaper Bell's Weekly Messenger and other periodicals.

Dawks is the name of a family of booksellers and printers who practised their craft in London during the seventeenth century and later. The younger Thomas Dawks was honoured with the title of 'His Majesty's Printer for the British Language' in 1676. Ichabod Dawks, 'honest Ichabod' as Steel called him, and the best-known member of the family, published Dawks's NewsLetter on the evenings of Post Nights (i.e. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday) from 1696 to 1716. For this periodical a special script type in imitation of handwriting was used, the matrices of which have recently been identified. Mr Morison's account of the Dawkses, based upon a family diary which he lately discovered, enlarges at several points our knowledge of their respective careers, and, in the case of Ichabod, demonstrates the character of his contribution to the progress of English journalism. Illustrated with type facsimiles, line blocks and nine pages of collotype facsimiles of newsletters.