Selected Essays on Books and Printing

Van Gendt & Co., Amsterdam, first edition, 1970 [ actually 1971 ]. Dark orange -coloured half morocco gilt, marbled endpapers, large 8vo, 31 cm,. xi, 491 pp, ills, (2 folding). A collection of 40 essays, the majority concerned with aspects of Johnson's special interest : the history of books and printing in the 16th century. "[Johnson was] first and foremost a bibliographer who happened at the same time to be a historian of typography: of printing and typefounding. He was an early recruit to the company of Daniel B. Updike, Stanley Morison, and others who took the initiative in exploring the history of printing in a new way, by looking at type faces as well as at the printers who used them. A relatively small part of Johnson's studies has gone into books, though no type historian or bibliographer could have done without his Type Designs or his Encyclopedia of Typefaces (jointly with Turner Berry and Jaspert), to name only two. But many of his writings were published in periodicals, yearbooks, and the like that are now hard to come by." - from the introduction. The contents include: Introduction, by Percy H. Muir; The Classification of Gothic Types; A Catalogue of Italian Writing-Books of the Sixteenth Century; A Short History of Printing in the Sixteenth Century; The Chancery Types of Italy and France (jointly with Stanley Morison); Italian Sixteenth-Century Books; Books printed at Lyons in the Sixteenth Century; The Supply of Types in the Sixteenth Century; Some French Bible Illustrations in the Sixteenth Century; Geofroy Tory; Oronce Fine as an Illustrator of Books; The 'Antwerp' Ornaments; An Alphabet by Pieter Coecke van Aelst; Some Notes on German Renaissance Title-Borders; The Title-Borders of Hans Holbein; Basle Ornaments on Paris Books, 1519-36; Some Cologne and Basle Types, 1525-52; English Books printed Abroad; Books printed at Heidelberg for Thomas Cartwright; Some Types used by Paolo Manuzio; The Italic Types of Robert Granjon; Christian Egenolff of Frankfurt and his Types; On Re-reading Updike; Title-Pages: their Forms and Development, 1500-1800; English Typography in the Seventeenth Century; Notes on Some Seventeenth-Century English Types and Type; Specimens; An Unrecorded Specimen Sheet of a Scottish Printing House; Type Designs and Type-founding in Scotland; The Exiled English Church at Amsterdam and its Press; J. F. Stam, Amsterdam, and English Bibles; Typography at the Cambridge University Press, c. 1700; The 'Goût Hollandois'; John Bagford, Antiquary, 1650-1716;The King's Printers, 1660-1742;English Type Specimen Books;The Homes of the London Typefounders (jointly with W. Turner-Berry);The modern-Face Type in England; Fat Faces: their History, Forms, and Use;Typographia, or the Printer's Instructor; Old-Face Types in the Victorian Age; Nineteenth-Century Typefounders and Mechanical Inventions; References;Bibliographical Note; Index. A few light pencil sidelinings, Very Good.