Erik-jan.Vens@bbs.acs.unc.edu (Erik-jan Vens) (04/07/91)
To come back on the subject of the London Underground lettering done by Johnston, I found this in "Eric Gill" by Fiona MacCarthy: The Johnstons had by this time [1915] arrived in Ditchling too. Edward Johnston had had his mind on Ditchling since the Gills had first arrived there. He had an instinctive love for the traditions of the country and the craftmen's respect for the proper way of doing things: the right way to lay the hedge, the best cure for a ham. The thought of an old Sussex wagon sent him into raptures: he saw it as 'A kind of Fairy Land Ship for beauty, with all its little stop-chamferred and painted banisters and beautiful time and craft shaped "parts".' (He added: 'I dare say it had a vocabulary of its own of anything from 50 to 100 words ore more.') The early dreams of the Gill and Johnston families for building a house somewhere up under the Downs, where the men could work together and the wives could bake together, never quite worked out and the Johnstons had started Ditchling life in a rather ugly villa on the outskirts of the village. But their old intimacy had to some extent been recreated, and Gill had been involved with Johnston in the early stages of the sans serif design for the London Underground. Gill always acknowledged this project as a precursor of his own famous sans serif type design. Erik-Jan Vens (erikjan@icce.rug.nl) -- ============================================================================= Extended Bulletin Board Service, Research & Development Office of Information Technology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill internet: bbs.acs.unc.edu or 128.109.157.30