John Lewis (typographer)
John Lewis was a printer, illustrator and collector of printed ephemera.Information
He was educated at Charterhouse and Goldsmiths', where his contemporaries included Denton Welch and Carel Weight. Lewis taught graphic design at the Royal College of Art from 1951 to 1963. With Michael Twyman and Maurice Rickards, he was a pioneer in the study of printed ephemera, and in 1962 published the first major book in the field, Printed Ephemera: the changing uses of type and letterforms in English and American printing. In the 1960s Lewis also edited an influential series of paperbacks for Studio Vista in the UK and Reinhold in the US, including authors such as Peter Cook, Theo Crosby, Alan Fletcher, Ken Garland, Bob Gill, Norman Potter, David Pye, Paul Rand and Alison and Peter Smithson.
The John Lewis Printing Collection of more than 20,000 items from the fifteenth to the twentieth century is held at Reading University.Selected works
- 1947 A Handbook of Printing Types
- 1954 Graphic Design: with special reference to lettering, typography and illustration
- 1962 Printed Ephemera: the changing uses of type and letterforms in English and American printing
- 1964 Illustration: aspects and directions
- 1965 Typography: basic principles
- 1966 Handbook of Type and Illustration
- 1967 The Twentieth Century Book: its illustration and design
- 1976 Collecting Printed Ephemera: a background to social habits and social history, to eating and drinking, to travel and heritage
- 1978 Typography: design and practice
- 1994 Such Things Happen: the life of a typographer
