True to Type: A Typographical Autobiography (review)

If at the age of eighteen and a half Ruari McLean had indeed followed his dream of riding horses in South America, this book would never have come to be. Instead, his autobiography gives a vivid and personal account of his career in typography. McLean's autobiography is perhaps much like the diaries he tells us he has kept since his youth. Full of drawings, letters, photographs, and reproductions of book covers and designs and peopled with anecdotes of characters who touched his life, McLean's book is more than an autobiography, it is a tribute to all who inspired him—whether through encouragement, friendship, collaboration, comedy, example or rejection—and to everything that instilled in him a love of words. It is at once a series of personal recollections, a memoir of his career, and an anecdotal history of the publishing world of London in the 1950s and 1960s.

The book begins with a note about Manticore, the typeface designed by John Hudson and used for this text. In his preface and postscript, McLean reflects on what he sees as the irony of typography. A typographer's principal aim is to design printed matter with art and skill in order to transfer the author's message to the reader's brain. The process should occur quickly and easily. A typographer might be said to fail when a reader notices the mechanism by which this transfer occurs; he succeeds when his work goes unnoticed. Ruari McLean's life and his contributions to the field show that typography is not to be ignored but rather admired critically. Among his contributions are The Thames & Hudson Manual of Typography, published in 1980 and still considered among the top ten books on typography, and Jan Tschichold: A Life in Typography, a biography of the renowned German typographer whom McLean first meets after finding one of Tschichold's typography booklets in his desk drawer at a printing firm in London and discovering that Tschichold was neither dead nor too aged to be visited by a young, eager typographer. A list of other works by McLean is included before the very convenient index.

In the twenty-one chapters of the book, readers can expect to delight in a number of personal anecdotes, including that McLean's love of books arose due to a tonsil infection that kept him regularly in bed from the age of four to twelve, that he once found a tea towel bearing a typographical pattern he had designed for a book cover and hoped to sue over copyrights, and that he married his wife because she was beautiful and had thin ankles. His love of books is made abundantly clear when, in the same sentence, he beams with pride over the births of his first published work and his first son.

Readers will also be introduced to an array of colorful characters McLean came to know throughout his career. The famous publisher Richard Blackwell, who gives McLean his first opportunity to work at a press, makes an appearance; McLean's first mentor, the absent-minded Bernard Newdigate, drives away in a car before realizing it is not his; MacLean's most faithful yet quirky secretary, Fianach Lawry, miraculously becomes fertile after a car accident. Of course, many prominent authors, artists, and businesspeople of the time appear throughout the pages. McLean doesn't leave out his friends, family, or the office dog, Slocum. Much of the chapter titled "Victorian Books," for example, is devoted to a description of the many booksellers he encountered in his search for nineteenth-century books.

Looking back on his life, McLean sums up his career: "My work had ranged from letter headings for friends, and then companies, parish magazines, children's books for Penguin, then the comics Eagle, Girl, Swift and Robin, to magazines like Picture Post and the New Scientist, and then a wide...