Johnston & Gill: Very British Types by Mark Ovenden
James Fergusson
Johnston & Gill: Very British Types
Edward Johnston and Eric Gill were, both of them, brilliant amateurs: a very recognisable British type. Johnston – born on a ranch in Uruguay, the son of a feckless ex-army officer; his Johnston grandfather a Scottish MP, married to a Norfolk Buxton – pulled out of medicine at Edinburgh University to ‘go in for Art’ in London. Fascinated by illuminated manuscripts, he took up calligraphy. William Morris’s friend W R Lethaby was so impressed that he put Johnston in charge of a lettering class at the new Central School of Art and Crafts. In 1906 he published a book, Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, hailed by Sydney Cockerell as the best handbook ever written on any subject.
Ten years younger, Gill – son of a Calvinist Methodist ex-congregationalist minister in Brighton – abandoned architecture, quixotically, to take up stonemasonry. In his spare time he attended the Central School to study calligraphy – under Edward Johnston.
The two types of Mark Ovenden’s title are not, however, types in a William Nicholson sense, but the two typefaces which may keep the names of Johnston and Gill alive long after all else about them is forgotten. The history of Johnston Sans and Gill Sans is as interwoven as that, for twenty years at least, of their creators. Gill shared Johnston’s lodgings in Lincoln’s Inn in 1902 and then, after marriage, moved in around the corner from him in Hammersmith. This was Arts and Crafts central: William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and T J Cobden-sanderson’s Doves Press had started nearby; Emery Walker and the future founder of St Dominic’s Press, Hilary Pepler, were Johnston’s neighbours. Come the First World War, Pepler, Gill and Johnston were all to be found at Ditchling in Sussex, Hammersmith in rure.
Johnston and Gill are strangely mediaeval figures, Gill making sacred his calling as an artist craftsman, indeed a jack of all crafts, fiercely virile with chisel and smock, Johnston, slighter, more ethereal, making his living by his quill. Yet Ovenden’s concern is to present them as inventive modernists, who, in slaying the serif, changed the face of 20thcentury printing. They were not the first to design sanserif types, but they made them mainstream. Johnston’s type for London Underground defined a national institution. Gill’s for the Lanston Monotype Corporation was adopted by the government, the railways and the BBC.
As early as 1903 St John Hornby, himself a private press enthusiast (owner of the Ashendene Press), had commissioned Gill to paint fascias for W H Smith; Gill finally prescribed Smith’s their own alphabet. He it could have been on whom Frank Pick, the dynamic commercial manager of the Underground Electric Railways of London, called to design a sanserif type to unify the signage of the fast-opening stations of London Underground. But it was Johnston to whom Pick first mooted the matter in 1913; by the time, two years later, that they met again (Gill this time present), Gill was busy sculpting the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral. When Johnston won the commission, he gave Gill ten per cent of his fee. The story of the collaboration of Pick and Johnston, and their meticulous campaign of branding, from the allimportant ‘roundel’ to timetables and travel posters, can hardly too often be told.
Eric Gill’s break into type came as fortuitously as did Johnston’s. Stanley Morison, Monotype’s typographic adviser, visited an antiquarian bookshop in Bristol in 1927 and was struck by the lettering of the shop’s fascia, ‘DOUGLAS CLEVERDON’. It had been hand-painted by Gill in a prototype alphabet for Gill Sans. Monotype released a version of it the following year.
Lund Humphries was one of the first to adopt Gill Sans. Now its smartly presented book, rich in photographs of alphabets, architecture and poster art, probing the small subtleties of tittles, too, and petits-serifs, gives the context of these historic typefaces and tells what happened afterwards, how Eiichi Kono updated Johnston, how Gill has been varied for digital use. It is an astonishing, and quite 21st-century, tale. At the heart of it, however, are two close friends born in the late 19th century who looked for inspiration to the lettering at the base of Trajan’s Column and the nobility of its majuscules. Hatchards price: £36