True to Type

Citation

Rogerson, I. (2002), "True to Type", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 1, pp. 45-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.1.45.4

Ruari McLean has been a ceaseless propagandist for good book design and can claim to have had a significant influence on the look of the book from 1950 until the end of printing by hot metal. In general, standards of book production have declined since that time and, after 25 years of computer typesetting, barely show any signs of recovery. McLean and those designers of similar persuasion may wonder whether or not their efforts were worthwhile. Only time will show.

McLean trained at the Edinburgh College of Printing and subsequently gained valuable experience while working for brief periods at Waterlows, The Studio Ltd, J. Walter Thompson and Lund Humphries. Contacts made along the way were to prove invaluable following the Second World War, McLean’s part in which is the subject of an anecdotal but modest account. Following demobilisation, the author spent time at Penguin Books before turning freelance and teaching part‐time at the Royal College of Art. He was then fortunate to be employed in designing Marcus Morris’s famous comic The Eagle. Other work for the Hulton Press followed.

One of the most valuable parts of the book deals with his collaboration with George Rainbird, a larger‐than‐life character, whose contribution to book design deserves to be better known. Together, in 1951, they set up Rainbird McLean Ltd, an innovative design studio to serve the publishing industry. Fine Bird Books (1953) and Great Flower Books (1956) were early examples of superb design emerging from the studio, the Connoisseur Period Guides were forerunners of a new type of informative “coffee table” book which spawned countless imitators, proof enough that McLean had set a new style and standard in genre.

Not many are both gifted and bold enough to seize the opportunity to rise to the top in their chosen professions, but McLean has doubly excelled. His pamphlet, Modern Book Design, published by Longmans, for the British Council, in 1951 and later expanded in the eponymous monograph (Faber and Faber, 1958), brought a new dimension to the history of the period. Even more significantly, his brilliantly illustrated book, Victorian Book Design and Illustration (Faber and Faber, 1963), not only breathed new life into a period of book production largely overlooked or even ignored, but caused a sea‐change in book collecting. McLean’s researches into nineteenth‐century book production, coupled with his ability to bring the subject to life through economical, yet interesting prose, resulted in a new generation of book collectors brought to appreciate the work of Edmund Evans, Benjamin Fawcett and other pioneer colour printers.

To write a biography centred on a life in book making is not easy. A three‐dimensional object of beauty often fails to materialise in two‐dimensional prose; but McLean’s autobiography is a good read from start to finish. It shows a man who was not afraid to take chances, who was prepared to fight to justify his ideals in a hard commercial world where the artist’s view is often ignored and who succeeded in bringing these together in a definitive handbook, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography (1980), which has been translated into a number of languages and which still remains in print.

In True to Type, the author’s dry wit peeps through when he thinks it worthwhile to remember and recount some of the odder happenings in his life. McLean joins a distinguished line of Scotsmen who have given books a visual aesthetic which enhances their literary value and that is what McLean believes to be the true purpose of book design.