BRUCE ROGERS, A LIFE IN LETTERS 1870-1957

Austin: W. Thomas Taylor, 1989. quarter black leather with patterned paper-covered boards, red leather spine label. Rogers, Bruce. small 4to. quarter black leather with patterned paper-covered boards, red leather spine label. xvii, 215 pages. With a foreword by John Dreyfus. First edition, limited to 2125 copies, of which this is one the 125 specially bound copies signed by the author on the half-title page. A fine copy. A biography of Rogers by an acknowledged expert in the field. Designed and printed at the press of W. Thomas Taylor with plates produced at The Press of A. Colish. Contains a list of subscribers, of which Robert D. Fleck was one of.



This book forms an intimate look at the life of this innovative typographer, through the many letters he wrote as he worked in both England and the United States. Included are 57 plates, with a number printed in two colors, and reproductions of book pages he designed, including two-page foldouts of pages from the Oxford Lectern Bible.



American typographer and inventer of the "Centaur" typeface (based on the Renaissance-period printing of Nicolas Jenson), is considered by many to be one of the greatest book designers of the twentieth century. He designed books for the Riverside Press, Cambridge, where he cut his first typeface, "Montaigne," named for the first book it appeared in, "The Essays of Montaigne," 1903; he designed "Centaur" while working as house designer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1916, he worked for the Cambridge University Press, and a few years later returned to the U.S. where he met William Edwin Rudge and was employed by him at his Mount Vernon Press. During this time he also designed books for Harvard University Press and served as typographic advisor to Lanston Monotype. In 1928, Rogers returned to England where he produced what many have called "the most important and notable typographic achievement of the twentieth century," his Oxford Lectern Bible.