SECOND EDITION, FABER & FABER, 1972, HARDCOVER, ILLUSTRATED, LARGE FORMAT, CONDITION; AS NEW.
Enlarged second edition with 16 new colour plates and other illustrations. The book offers the first historically precise description of the process of colour printing.
"Colour printing and the decoration and illustration of books and their bindings flourished in England in an extraordinary and unprecedented way between about 1830 and 1880. Ruari McLean describes how the period begins with the introduction of chromolithography and the inventions of Baxter and others, and ends with the introduction around 1880 of photo-mechanical methods, which spelled the death of old hand crafts whose triumphs and even excesses are the subject of this book"
The author, Ruari McLean was a British typographic designer. McLean was a prolific collector of Victorian books and became an expert and well-known author of works on the subject.
His Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing was published in 1963, with this second edition in 1972. This was followed by books on Victorian Bookbindings in Cloth and Leather (1973) and on those in paper (1983). He translated some of Tschichold's books and wrote about him in Jan Tschichold: Typographer (1975) and Jan Tschichold: A Life in Typography (1997). He later wrote his typographical autobiography, True to Type (2000), and Half Seas Under, a record of his naval career (2003).
His best-known work is Magazine Design, published in 1969. McLean was of the opinion that the design and layout of magazines was of crucial importance and significance in the pre-television era, and this work became known as a practitioner's manual for those in the profession. He wrote the Thames & Hudson Manual of Typography, published in 1980, which drew on his unusually wide experience of the subject, as did his historical survey How Typography Happens, published by the British Library in 2000.
McLean was Typographic Adviser to HMSO 196690, and much involved in assessing graphic design courses at art colleges all over Britain. From 1981 he also became a trustee of the National Library of Scotland. He gave the Sanders Lectures in Bibliography at Cambridge in 1983.
McLean was author of numerous other works, including Modern Book Design (1958), and many of these have become standard reference works.
