Here are some covers and spreads from three delightful publications.
The first, Alphabet and Image, a short-lived post war quarterly magazine devoted to typography and the graphic arts. It was a rather campaigning publication in its own way. In issue 5 /1947 they accused the master printers and craft unions as ‘suffering from a mental hardening of the arteries and lack of awareness of some of the greater insistent problems of the day in the allied industries’. They went on to lambast them about their seeming disinterest in design. In an earlier issue they suggested that government departments would do well to employ the skills of Reynolds Stone who they say was underemployed. The typographer Robert Harding who had also been responsible for Time & Tide in 1947 designed the magazine.
And these rather charming illustrations where trade ads that appeared in the magazine...
And here some detailed illustration by the wonderful Robin Jacques who went on to become one of Radio Times's regular contributors.
After Alphabet and Image folded Image was born...
doing much the same job but with a concentration on illustration.
This later publication Typographica...
was produced in the 60s. It was edited by Herbert Spencer and published by Lund Humphries. Its topics were as diverse as newspaper seals, compass roses, and the engravings of Thomas Bewick to Robert Brownjohn’s experiments with type on film.