Transitional faces:
searching for Richard Austin

The second annual Justin Howes memorial lecture

Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 7pm, admission free

Richard Austin, arguably Britain’s greatest type designer, has been lost in history. With help from Justin Howes, Alastair Johnston has established who the two Richard Austins were. The father, Richard Austin (1756–1832) was the brilliant punch-cutter behind Bell & Stephenson’s British Letter Foundry. He also cut the revolutionary Porson greek for Cambridge University Press and the modern face types of the Wilson foundry of Glasgow and William Miller of Edinburgh (the so-classed Scotch roman), early in the nineteenth century. Richard T. Austin, his son (1781–1842), was a trade wood engraver (not a Bewick pupil) who worked for a range of metropolitan and provincial printers in England and Scotland. Alastair Johnston places their lives and works in the cultural context of their times.

Alastair Johnston is a printer at Poltroon Press in Berkeley, California, which was established in 1975 and is considered a pioneer of the artists’ book movement. He has written bibliographies of three San Franciscan literary small presses, translated Vervliet on Granjon and Tschichold on Sabon, and is the author of Alphabets to order: the literature of nineteenth-century typefounders’ specimens.