Penrose’s Annual, 1934
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Mikey Ashworth and tagged with “falstaff” and “thorneshaded”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Penrose Annuals of this period are frequently still a joy to peruse – allsorts of fascinating things to be re-discovered. The Annual was designed not just to be a technical document but also an exemplar of the printer’s art and I get the impression that the staff of Percy Lund Humphries Country Press in Bradford put their heart and soul into this annual job. The title page from the 1934 edition – paper was Canadian for this volume (Buff Themis Text by Howard Smith Paper Mills), inks by Shackell, Edwards and type based on Monotype Scotch Roman, Falstaff and Stephenson, Blake’s Thorne Shaded. The vignette is by Horn.
2 Comments on “Penrose’s Annual, 1934”
This use of fat faces in the 1930s is quite interesting – effectively early Victoriana. It’s fun to compare it to Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste of the previous year.
On this topic, does anyone know what the Festival is that 'Falstaff Festival’ is a reference to? I wondered if it’s a Festival of Britain reference, but if so I can’t find references to that anywhere.
My understanding is that Falstaff Festival is a style that was only added in the digital version by Steve Matteson.
Monotype did show a decorated version once, in an ad from around 1950, but that wasn’t a ready-made type design, and rather “printed from a line block reduction of retouched photograph of 72pt. Falstaff capitals over which proofs of our 12pt. Border No. 24 had been pasted”.