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The Crafty Linotyper [extract]
In the autumn of 1936, the Swiss designer and pioneer of photographics Herbert Matter arrived in New York as the official tour photographer for the Zurich-based dance company Trudi Schoop. Marking the end of a two-month tour of America, Matter’s arrival in the city occasioned an opportunity to decide whether he had a liking for the country and its way of life. Like many other European émigrés before and after, the abundance of companies, agencies and publishing houses that populated the city, convinced him to stay and exploit new opportunities.
Matter’s first port of call was The Composing Room. Founded in 1927 by Dr. Robert L. Leslie and Sol Cantor, The Composing Room was no ordinary type foundry. As one brief history of this organisation has put it, Leslie ‘didn’t follow the accepted pattern with Composing Room promotion. He started holding typographic and design clinics for production men, young artists, and advertising people generally. These were held in The Composing Room offices, and in a spare room later christened a “gallery”. To impress and inform these audiences or classes – the series of meetings soon became a “course” – the ingenious “Doc” invited men of ability in the graphic arts to address the groups. The courses and meetings clicked.’
With the success of this design saloon and foreseeing a gap in the market, in 1934, Leslie created his own publication entitled PM (an abbreviation of production manager. This was subsequently changed to AD (art director) in 1939, when Ralph Ingersoll bought the title for his left-leaning daily). With the newspaper man Percy Seitlin as his co-editor and Hortense Mendel involved in publicity, this small-format periodical became one of the few publications to offer a platform for all that was new in both American and European graphic design. From 1934 to 1942, 66 issues of pm / ad showcased the work of such émigré designers as M. F. Agha, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Will Burtin, Joseph Binder, and Walter Gropius. This was complemented by the exposure of designs and illustrations by homegrown talents such as Paul Rand, Lester Beall, and Joseph Sinel. [...]
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