Author(s): Graham S. Hudson

Art, Design & Photography

This book explores the closely interwoven printing histories of Britain and America. American colonial printers and engravers imported British type and equipment, took instruction from the same manuals and were guided by the same exemplars as their British counterparts, a relationship that continued through the first half of the nineteenth century. Following the Civil War, American graphic design and typography began to establish distinctive identities, with developments in color printing bringing an efflorescence of color-rich trade cards, cigar-box labels and other chromolithographed ephemera that was essentially American. Nevertheless, ideas continued to be shared across the Atlantic. American foundries devised entirely original typefaces that were imported into Britain, yet the development of expertise in designing with these new faces depended on printers learning from one another, and the scheme of specimen exchange that successfully achieved this was wholly devised and administered from London.