John Ryder had a long and distinguished career as a typographer and book production manager in London, and was one of the last to work in commercial letterpress book production. From 1946 to 1957, he worked at Phoenix House Ltd. who published the first edition of Printing for Pleasure. In 1957, he was hired at The Bodley Head, a prestigious firm established in 1887, which published the revised edition in 1976 and where he principly worked until his retirement in 1987.

Mr Ryder was awarded a Fellowship of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers in 1974, although he had not previously been a member. 
In December of that same year, he was honored with an exhibition¹ of his work at The Bodleian Library in Oxford. That exhibit titled “John Ryder, Designer & Art Director for The Bodley Head” featured his work for that firm, but also included earlier work while at Phoenix House, and examples from his private imprint the, Miniature Press. Many of the items displayed form the Bodleian's John Ryder Collection, the repository for Mr Ryder’s personal and professional archives. The archive includes manuscripts, proofs, mock-ups, and his correspondences with pre-eminent designers, printers, publishers, and scholars, among them: David Godine, John Dreyfus, Giovanni Mardersteig, Ruari McLean, Reynolds Stone, and Jan Tschichold.

For over forty years Mr Ryder lived in Richmond upon Thames, Surrey until his death in 2001, where at his Miniature Press, he experimented with typographic arrangements printed on an Adana Quarto horizontal platen press. Adana presses, made in England and easily available, were ideal for the amateur printing at home, and the quarto horizontal is the press most frequently discussed in Printing for Pleasure. Ryder recommends his choice because of its compact size and simple design that is “ideally suited to the designer who may wish to take a few impressions of many arrangements of type. For this purpose a simplified form of typesetting can be employed.”

See Checklist for other titles by and about John Ryder.

Footnotes

  
1. A booklet accompanying the exhibition (see Checklist) notes that Printing for Pleasure was then out of print, but that The Bodley Head would soon make a new edition available. Printed letterpress in a trim size matching Printing for Pleasure, it offers some biographical information and reflects on Ryder’s career beginning at Phoenix House Ltd. where “There, under his direction, as more recently at The Bodley Head, a distinctive house style began to emerge, a look achieved not through ostentatious typography nor even a standardised grid, but through discreet rules applied consistently to spacing, type size, margin widths and the pursuit of high-quality printing related to legibility.” This same writer notes that, “at The Bodley Head, John Ryder has developed a standard which is noticeable for the very anonymity which, if anything, is its guiding principal.”

Although this booklet lent important information to the present research, the wish is that an offset, color catalogue had been produced to show page spreads from the various titles cited. However, it does reprint, in various single spot colors, line illustrations from outstanding designers and illustrators of Mr Ryder’s association including Michael Harvey, John DePol, and Maurice Sendak. It also provides a checklist of over one hundred private presses and printers represented in the Ryder Collection including: Victor Hammer, the Offinica Bodoni, Rampant Lion Press, Spiral Press, and Adrian Wilson.   |   Return to text

Tribute

John Ryder Remembered by His Friends. London: Bertram Rota, 2001.

Obituaries

The Times, London. January 25, 2001. Available at Richard-Gabriel Rummonds website.

Bucks Free Press (Richmond local paper)