Minnesota & Whittington

Whittington Press archive

16 of the fifty boxes destined for the archives of the University of Minnesota, total weight almost half a ton, to join the rest of the Whittington archive that has already been there for nearly 30 years. The University had our only complete collection of every book in every edition in 1985, a collection which it would now be virtually impossible to repeat. It will now have all the correspondence files going back to A Boy at the Hogarth Press in 1972, including for the first 32 issues of Matrix, the working material (proofs, paste-ups, layouts) for each publication, and much else besides.

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Michael Harvey: ‘Book-jackets’

Michael Harvey Jubilate

Michael Harvey was the finest lettering artist of his generation, following in the tradition of Berthold Wolpe at Fabers. I first met him in 1972 when I worked for Heinemann, for whom he did some work. We discussed the idea of him doing an alphabet for the embryonic Whittington Press, but sadly nothing came of it. In Matrix 26 he described his apprenticeship with Reynolds Stone, and in Matrix 27 his earlier time stonecutting with Joseph Cribb, who had worked with Eric Gill at Ditchling before the war. John Randle

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