Allan Fleming was born in Toronto in 1929. At 16 he left studies at the Western Technical School to apprentice at various design firms in Toronto. He then went to England, where he soaked up lessons from some of the great British book designers. Back in Canada in 1957 he joined the typographic firm Cooper and Beatty Ltd., and was working there when the opportunity to redesign Canadian National’s logo came up in 1959.  In 1962 he became art director at Maclean’s magazine. He was vice-president and director of creative services at MacLaren Advertising from 1963 to 1968, and chief designer at the University of Toronto Press until 1976,  when he joined Burns and Cooper.

Suave, handsome, well-read, eloquent and confident, Fleming epitomised ‘cool.’ His design work won many awards in Canada, the United States and around the world. Though best remembered as the creator of CN’s corporate logo, Fleming was also a superb book designer, and this is what I talked about recently with Canadian literary journalist Robert Fulford who knew and was influenced by Fleming. Please listen here:

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Peter Cocking is a Vancouver-based graphic designer and design teacher. His wide ranging portfolio includes annual reports, airline tickets, snack-food boxes, CD packages, corporate identity programs, newspapers, and magazines. Since 2002 his focus has been on book and typographic design as art director at Douglas & McIntyre Publishing. Peter is the recipient of more than 40 awards for his design work. Peter has lectured at the national conferences of the AIGA and the AAUP, and to the Type Directors Club in New York. In 2009 he became the first Canadian juror at the ‘Best Books in the World’ competition, held annually in Leipzig, Germany.

We met recently at his offices in Vancouver to talk about D&M and some of the notable books that it has published.

Robert Reid (Left) with friend and fellow book designer Tak Tanabe

Born in Alberta in 1927, Robert Reid moved to Vancouver with his family at an early age.  During his second year at the University of British Columbia he spotted a beautiful rubricated book on display in the library which inspired him to make something similar. Two years later, in 1949, he issued his first limited edition, a reprint of Alfred Waddington’s The Fraser Mines Vindicated.

This book was well received, and encouraged him to set up his own commercial print shop in downtown Vancouver. Through the 1950s he designed and printed  a lot of beautiful material,  including the B.C. Library Quarterly magazine. During this time he also was typographic advisor to the editorial committee at the University of British Columbia.

During the sixties he printed three limited editions – The Journal of Norman Lee (1959), Kuthan’s Menagerie of Interesting Zoo Animals (1960), and poet John Newlove’s first collection, Grave Sirs: (1962) – before moving to Montreal for a job as director of production and design at McGill University Press. Here he published his magnum opus, The Lande Bibliography of Canadiana. It remains one of Canada’s most beautifully crafted books.

In the mid seventies Robert left for New York, where he spent the next 25 years packaging books for major publishers. He returned to Vancouver in 1998 where he continues to participate in the making of beautiful books with, among others, Heavenly Monkey Press, and the Alcuin Society.

We met recently in Vancouver to talk about his impressive, life-long achievements. Please listen here:

from Brian Busby’s The Dusty Bookshelf

Frank Newfeld  is a Canadian book designer, illustrator, art director and educator.

He has designed over 650 books and won more than 170 Canadian and international awards,  is a former Vice-President of Publishing at McClelland & Stewart and  Head of the Illustration Program at Sheridan College,  and Co-founder of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada

Newfeld has written and designed three children’s books, two of them published by Oxford University Press and one by Groundwood Books (Douglas & McIntyre). In 2008 his memoir  Drawing on Type was published by Porcupine’s Quill.

We talk here about the origins of his career as a book designer and illustrator, about some of his innovations, about the books he considers his best, and about which of his titles the collector might fruitfully pursue.

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Copyright Nigel Beale 2010

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JMV

Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Robert Bringhurst is an award winning Canadian poet, typographer and author. Perhaps best known for  The Elements of Typographic Style – a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type, he is also a respected translator of poetic works from Haida into English.  He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, B.C.

We met recently in Ottawa to talk about his definition of the book as articulated in The Surface of Meaning, and of typography and the services it ideally offers its readers, including:

Invite the reader into the text

Reveal the tenor and meaning of the text

Clarify the structure and the order of the text

Link the text with other existing elements

Induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading

Please listen to our conversation here:

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C.S. 'Scott' Richardson is an accomplished book designer who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple recipient of the Alcuin Award (Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed, he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet, and is currently at work on his second.

We talk here about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.

Copyright © 2007 by Nigel Beale,  Find and listen to other Biblio File interviews here.
 

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