ImpPress Typebook: Being a Complete Showing of Typefaces, Borders, Dingbats, Miscellanea Available at the Aforementioned.
(Houston, TX: ImpPress, 1965). Small octavo. (12)ff. One of 150 copies, signed by the artist and printer, Dugald Stermer. A quirky type specimen book printed on various colors of paper, in many colors of ink. With full-page illustrations, including a cartoonish frontispiece of a man with a printing press in the top of his head, as well as typographic ornaments and engravings that include the headings from 19th-century almanacs. The ImpPress Typebook is characterized by Stermer's sense of humor: Stermer writes in the colophon that this type sample book was "...primarily intended as a means by which the Prop is cutting down smoking. It is almost impossible to set type and smoke simultaneously." Although best known as a San Francisco-based illustrator, designer, and art director who worked for such influential magazines as Ramparts and Mother Jones, Dugald Stermer started the ImpPress while living in Houston, Texas during the 1960s. He became inspired to print after he was given a small printing press and some assorted type by his wife for Christmas. From the library of Ben and Bernarda Shahn, with a label laid in designed by their son, Jonathan Shahn. A small library label to front cover, else fine in black printed wrappers. A scarce book: no copies are recorded in OCLC. Item #24739
Price: $475.00