Transitional Faces: The Lives & Work of Richard Austin, Typecutter and Richard Turner Austin, Wood-Engraver - Hardcover

Literary Nonfiction. Biography. Art. Publishing History & Typography. Long thought to be one person, Richard Austin turns out to be a father and son who shared the same name. Although Austin's importance to the history of typography was never in question, his (or rather their) dates and final resting place were forgotten. After a decade of research, printing historian Alastair Johnston has written a biography of the Austin family in which he assesses their contributions to the development of book design and typography at a crucial time in British publishing history. Richard Austin (1756-1832) took the innovations of John Baskerville and, through the sharpness and delicacy of his type cutting, perfected the typefaces of the period between the Old Face of Caslon and the Modern faces of the Didots and Bodoni, an era described as 'Transitional' by Updike, which saw the first flowering of the British fine press. In his later work, Austin pulled back from the impractical hair-lines of the Modern style to a workable type now known as Scotch Roman which became the workhorse of many sensible printers in Britain and North America. Austin's son and namesake Richard Turner Austin (1781-1842) was a commercial wood-engraver, producing blocks for scores of works in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. He was not a Bewick pupil but did learn by copying the work of John & Thomas Bewick, working alongside his father in Paul's Alley, St Giles Cripplegate, London (that's St Giles at left, on the cover). He also exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. In 1819, Austin Jr relocated to Edinburgh and began illustrating children's books for the house of Oliver & Boyd.