)
Many previous issues of Moorcock’s London titles have used fairly ubiquitous visual cues and images from the city’s more renowned landmarks
(
Sketches for the linocuts that Paul Catherall hand-printed for the three books’ covers, displaying the strict geometry and minimal detailing
(pictured above), testify to such a reductionist approach, paring back to the essential aspects. As with any physical printing process, the debossed (i.e. non- printing) area is as important— if not more so—to the overall composition than the inked sections that create the physi- cal impressions, creating balance through negative space and, in effect, activating the coloured areas.
London Types
Johnson is the typeface of the capital’s transport network; 2016 is its cente- nary year.
Ink case Yet the inked areas are hardly passive; noticable—and in a slight departure from Cather- ill’s usual style—is the contrast between the solid blocks of colour that comprise the build- ings, and the rougher, more uneven texture of the ethereal clouds. Also evident is the artist’s skill as a colourist, with great tone and depth to the structures belying what at first appears a fairly muted, restrained colour palette: it’s a consequence of the use of hybrid secondary colours: blue- ish greens, greyish blues, pinkish browns. Clearly Stericker wanted to show the prints the utmost respect, using them at their full extent: “I didn’t want any text overlapping the image, and I also didn’t want to crop into
Albertus is commonplace on City of London street signs; it is also used on many Faber & Faber book covers; its creator, Bertholde Wolpe, worked for the publisher
Univers Bold Condensed is used on the City of
Westminster’s roadsigns, adorning some of the
country’s most photo- graphed street signage
the images at all—so I made them slightly smaller, giving me space for quotes at the bottom.” Her choice of typeface ingrains the city further into the designs: “Gill Sans, to keep the London feel”. Te letterforms’ creator, Eric Gill, conceived them as a reappraisal, and improvement on Johnson, a typeface created by a mentor of his: Edward Johnson. Te latter is inescap- ably emblazoned across the city’s transport network, created as it was specifically for the nascent London Underground, and Gill, its near-lookalike, has become imbibed with an equally ubiqui- tous sense of Britishness: think Keep Calm and Carry On, the BBC, Penguin’s notorious oran- gle triband cover designs, and so forth. Inside the books, the text is set in Monotype’s Dante, with Scala used for headings and two- line drop caps adding emphasis
at the start of chapters; and the covers’ type treatment also borrows its colouring from the linocuts. Stericker concludes: “As these books
cover a large time period, I wanted to let the text and image work together by using the natural spaces . . . I wanted them to seem timeless.” ×
these pages are part of The Bookseller’s PerfectBound arm; launched In February with the stated mission “to explore, uncover and celebrate the field of publishing that might loosely be identified as design and/or production . . . as publishers’ content has been dematerialised (and reassembed in various guises) it has become apparent that
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a divide between form and content is fictitious. Design and production—“form”—is content.” If you have a forthcoming project or publication that you think aligns with the ethos, email
perfectbound@thebookseller.com. Alternately you can follow the coverage on Instagram or Twitter—the handle for both is @perfectbound_
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