Michael Twyman

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Michael Twyman (born 1934) is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. He joined the university staff in 1959. He established a BA (Hons) course in Typography & Graphic Communication which eventually grew into its own department in 1974. Both the programme and the department are widely acknowledged to be the first of their kind in the world. He retired from full-time teaching in 1998 but still teaches postgraduate students and is also the Director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies.

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He has been a visiting teacher at Rare Book Schools in Virginia, Lyons, Wellington and Melbourne. For many years he has served as Vice-President of the Printing Historical Society and in 2016 he succeeded Asa Briggs as President of the Ephemera Society.

Twyman is often cited for his works on the history of printing and ephemera, especially lithography. In addition, he is well known for his writings on the theory of graphic language. He also completed and edited Maurice Rickards' book Encyclopedia of Ephemera (London: British Library, 2000). He was an early member of the Printing Historical Society and has edited and contributed to issues of its Journal.

In 1983 he was awarded the Samuel Pepys Medal for his Outstanding Contribution to Ephemera Studies, and in 2014 the Sir Misha Black award and was added to the College of Medallists. [1] In 2021 he received the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society of London for distinguished services to bibliography.

Twyman is not to be confused with lawyer and conservative thinker Michael Tweyman of Toronto, Ontario.

Selected works

Related Research Articles

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Lithography is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps. Lithography can be used to print text or images onto paper or other suitable material. A lithograph is something printed by lithography, but this term is only used for fine art prints and some other, mostly older, types of printed matter, not for those made by modern commercial lithography.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ephemera</span> Transient items, usually printed

Ephemera are transitory creations which are not meant to be retained or preserved. Its etymological origins extends to Ancient Greece, with the common definition of the word being: "the minor transient documents of everyday life". Ambiguous in nature, various interpretations of ephemera and related items have been contended, including menus, newspapers, postcards, posters, sheet music, stickers and valentines.

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Color printing or colour printing is the reproduction of an image or text in color. Any natural scene or color photograph can be optically and physiologically dissected into three primary colors, red, green and blue, roughly equal amounts of which give rise to the perception of white, and different proportions of which give rise to the visual sensations of all other colors. The additive combination of any two primary colors in roughly equal proportion gives rise to the perception of a secondary color. For example, red and green yields yellow, red and blue yields magenta, and green and blue yield cyan. Only yellow is counter-intuitive. Yellow, cyan and magenta are merely the "basic" secondary colors: unequal mixtures of the primaries give rise to perception of many other colors all of which may be considered "tertiary".

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Haghe</span> Belgian lithographer, watercolourist

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Beatrice Lamberton Warde was a twentieth-century writer and scholar of typography. As a marketing manager for the British Monotype Corporation, she was influential in the development of printing tastes in Britain and elsewhere in the mid-twentieth century and was recognized at the time as "[o]ne of the few women typographers in the world". Her writing advocated higher standards in printing, and championed intelligent use of historic typefaces from the past, which Monotype specialised in reviving, and the work of contemporary typeface designers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Cooke Bourne</span>

John Cooke Bourne was a British artist, engraver and photographer, best known for his lithographs showing the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway and the Great Western Railway.

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Charles Joseph Hullmandel was born in London, where he maintained a lithographic establishment on Great Marlborough Street from about 1819 until his death.

Vincent Brooks, Day & Son was a major British lithographic firm most widely known for reproducing the weekly caricatures published in Vanity Fair magazine. The company was formed in 1867 when Vincent Brooks bought the name, good will and some of the property of Day & Son Ltd, which had gone into liquidation that year. The firm reproduced artwork and illustrations and went on to print many of the iconic London Underground posters of the twenties and thirties before being wound up in 1940.

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Pendleton's Lithography (1825–1836) was a lithographic print studio in 19th-century Boston, Massachusetts, established by brothers William S. Pendleton (1795-1879) and John B. Pendleton (1798-1866). Though relatively short-lived, in its time the firm was prolific, printing portraits, landscape views, sheet music covers, and numerous other illustrations. The Pendleton's work might be characterized by its generosity—each print contains a maxima of visual information designed for graphic reproduction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Curwen Press</span>

The Curwen Press was founded by the Reverend John Curwen in 1863 to publish sheet music for the "tonic sol-fa" system. The Press was based in Plaistow, Newham, east London, England, where Curwen was a pastor from 1844.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Barker (painter)</span>

Thomas Barker or Barker of Bath, was a British painter of landscape and rural life.

The Printing Historical Society or 'PHS' is a learned society devoted to the study of the history of printing, in all its forms.

John Lewis (1912–1996) was a printer, illustrator and collector of printed ephemera.

Alan Marshall is a British historian who works in France. He specialised in the history of printing, in particular that of phototypesetting.

Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and the Graphic Arts was a British magazine of typography and the graphic arts. Published and edited by Oliver Simon, it was subsidised and printed by the Curwen Press, of which Simon was a director. It appeared in fifteen volumes from 1935 to 1940, and eighteen volumes from 1946 to 1954 as a new series.

References

  1. "The Sir Misha Black Medal | Misha Black Awards". mishablackawards.org.uk. Archived from the original on 29 December 2016. Retrieved 25 June 2015.

Sources