Artist Info
Justin Howes Collection
Justin William Howes, typographer and historian, born April 4 1963; died February 21 2005
Read English at Christ Church, Oxford (1982-85).
Research fellow to the Crafts Study Centre at Bath, cataloguing their Johnston papers.
Research post at Bedford, making a catalogue: Edward Bawden: A Retrospective Survey (1988).
Freelance design work, including writing and designing an extensive text composition manual for the Advent 3B2 software company
Research fellowship at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1995 on the history of the Caslon types of the mid to late 18th century, culminating with his digital versions of these types, some of which he sold to the International Typeface Corporation in New York.
Re-established the firm of HW Caslon & Co Ltd in Rushden, Northamptonshire to market and sell the whole range of these fonts.
In 2002 he returned to live in London, where his interest in saving the culture and artefacts of printing now came to the fore.
In 1998 Howes had reanimated the Friends of the St Bride Printing Library, off Fleet Street, then beginning to face threats to its future under the Corporation of London. In the first flourish of this activity, in 1999, he helped the St Bride librarian, James Mosley, to organise a wonderful exhibition on sans serif letters at Sir John Soane's Museum, in central London. He designed and edited a book reissue of Mosley's essay on sans serif (The Nymph And The Grot).
In 2000, he published his own book, Johnston's Underground Type.
Howes switched his energies from the St Bride Library to the fledgling Type Museum in Stockwell, south London, where he worked as curator, sorting a large collection of typographic materials.
(taken from the obituary by Robin Kinross in the Guardian)