The Art of the Printer – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1956

The cover of The Art of the Printer reaches back to the earliest days of printing and lettering. Dair uses classic Roman letter shapes and construction principals to remind us that typography has always been governed by rules.

Each spread in The Art of the Printer has a foldout in which one side of the page cleverly works for two different sections. In this spread Dair uses a few of the pages that were chosen for Liber Librorum that had been held in Stockholm in 1955. He was the only Canadian designer invited to submit, his entry is the one in the lower left.

Notes

The Art of the Printer is the fifth and last booklet in the series on type and paper that Carl Dair produced for The E. B. Eddy Company. Here Dair brings everything back to the printer, at that time the person most responsible for making it all happen. The printer would soon be displaced by the graphic designer.

1956 was a busy year for Dair, he moved to Holland to begin six-months studying cutting metal type at the renowned type foundry Enschedé, in Haarlem. It was the first step in his eleven-year journey developing Cartier, Canada’s first Latin text type. 1956 also saw the formation of the Society of Typographic Designers of Canada (TDC), which would eventually become the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC).

Artifact Text

“A piece of printed matter is a salesman for the organization that produces it. Neatness of appearance, the manner of enlisting attention and sustaining interest, the clear attractive presentation of facts and, finally, those individual characteristics which make up personality — all of these things are just as important in the presentation of printed material as they are in choosing salesmen”.

Items in this Series

Type & Paper – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1946

Two-colour, 16 pp. saddle stitched booklet

Design for Printing – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1947

Two-colour booklet, 18 pp (including inside covers)

Type Talks – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1948

Two-colour booklet, 24 pp

Spacing – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1954

Two-colour booklet, 16 pp