Primitive Types

The Sans Serif Alphabet from Sir John Soane to Eric Gill

Primitive Types traces today’s sans serif alphabet back to its 18th-century origins in the enthusiasms of a group of English architects and sculptors. Sans serif types are, literally, letters without the finishing strokes at the beginning or end of the main strokes or stems: skeleton letters without heads and feet.

The architect Sir John Soane, with a few of his contemporaries who had spent a period studying in Rome, created a lettering that seemed primitive, but which to modern eyes seems satisfyingly geometrical and rational. Soane and his friends found their inspiration in the inscriptions of Republican Rome and 4th-century Greece, but were to exploit sans serif letters for their antiquarian connotations: in books on Gothic architecture, and to represent archaeological sites on all Ordnance Survey maps from 1816 onwards. For most of the 19th century, sans serif was known as Doric, Egyptian, Grotesque or Gothic, terms which underlined its links to the architectural revivals of the period.

Soane’s academic design was forgotten after 1830 as sans serif types entered the mainstream of the industrial revolution to become workhorse types widely used in advertising and commercial printing.

In the 20th century, letters without serifs came to be seen as letters without history. Since the Bauhaus, designers have welcomed their apparent freedom from any historical association, and they have been used wherever a simple message has to be expressed in neutral terms. Eric Gill’s sans serif type design (1928) echoed Soane’s approach in returning to Roman classical lettering for inspiration.

The exhibition includes a wealth of drawings, medals, printed books and other artefacts drawn mainly from the collections of the St Bride Printing Library and Sir John Soane’s Museum. Exhibits include the first known measured drawing of an architectural inscription, Flaxman’s Trafalgar Vase, Edward Johnston’s design for the London Underground, Eric Gill’s designs for the Gill Sans typeface, and Jock Kinneir’s designs for the motorway signage in use today.

This exhibition offers a fresh insight into the contemporary graphic environment of our cities, towns and transport systems, and a thought-provoking object lesson to contemporary architects and designers in how their predecessors created the image of a modern world by plundering the past. This will be an important exhibition, not just for those involved in book production, but for everyone interested in the wider fields of graphic design and visual communication.

Sponsorship

The exhibition is generously sponsored by B.A.S Printers Limited, of Over Wallop, Hampshire, to celebrate their 50th anniversary this year. One of the country’s leading fine art printers, B.A.S has a well-deserved international reputation for beautifully produced fine art exhibition catalogues, books, and journals, with clients who include the Burlington Magazine, and the British Council, National Galleries of Scotland, National Trust, and Tate Gallery.

Announcing the sponsorship, Paul Gumn, Sales Director of B.A.S, said:

“B.A.S welcomes this opportunity to become involved with two institutions whose distinctive voice, scale, and outlook, closely match our own. As a specialist fine art printer, B.A.S. is pleased to sponsor the exhibition Primitive Types, which explores the common ground shared by artists and architects, on the one hand, and printers and graphic designers on the other.”

The sponsorship sees B.A.S Printers become the first Corporate Patron of the new Friends of the St Bride Printing Library, formed to support the Library and safeguard its future. The Chairman of the Friends, Justin Howes, welcomed the sponsorship by saying:

“B.A.S Printers has a superb reputation for impeccable craftsmanship, an eye for detail, and an impressive history of technical innovation. These are qualities we value at St Bride’, site of the City of London’s first printing press in 1500, and a meeting-point for an international audience of printers, graphic designers, students, and historians. We are thrilled that B.A.S Printers has become our first Corporate Patron, and look forward to fostering the links between one of the UK’s largest and most modern industries, printing, and the National Printing Library.”

Curator

The exhibition is curated by James Mosley, Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library until 2000, whose 1965 essay on Soane?s lettering shaped the attitudes of a generation of graphic designers at a time when sans serif types were being widely adopted in graphic art, advertising, and public signage systems.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a large-format hardback book, The Nymph and the Grot, in which Mosley updates and enlarges his original 1965 essay with the results of continuing work on a theme with which he has been preoccupied for over thirty years. Extensively illustrated in colour and black and white, The Nymph and the Grot will be printed by B.A.S, whose involvement as exhibition sponsors makes it possible to produce a book which does full justice to the subject.

Activities

There will also be a series of activities, including Letters from London, a guided tour of the best architectural sans serifs to be seen within a short walking distance of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Venue

The exhibition takes place in the high-tech Soane Gallery at No.12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, opened in 1995 and designed by Eva Jiricna. Primitive Types is the first exhibition to be organised by Sir John Soane’s Museum in association with the Friends of St Bride Printing Library, set up in 1998 to support the National Printing Library. The exhibition underlines the national relevance of material held by the St Bride Printing Library, and marks a first step in the process of making its treasures accessible to a wider public.

Opening hours

The Sans Serif Alphabet
From Sir John Soane to Eric Gill

An exhibition organised by
The Friends of The St Bride Printing Library
in association with
Sir John Soane’s Museum

29 January — 24 April 1999

Primitive Types will be open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am—5pm
(late opening, first Tuesday of each month, 6—9pm)
Admission is £2 (free to students, under-18s, and ES40 / JS40s)

Stephen Astley (Sir John Soane’s Museum) — 0171 405 2107
Justin Howes (Friends of the St Bride Printing Library) — 01933 419 477
James Mosley (St Bride Printing Library) — 0171 353 4660
Paul Gumn (B.A.S Printers Limited) — 01264 781 711

Press photographs are available from Stephen Astley