We were sorry to hear of the death of John Miles, a long-standing friend of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, and a one-time External Examiner for our undergraduate programmes. We are proud custodians of the Banks and Miles archive that contains examples of partners Colin Banks and John Miles, including their work on […]

We were delighted to welcome the Friends of the University to look at the Elizabeth Greig Collection of civil aviation ephemera. The first UK national airline, Imperial Airways, was created in 1924. Making use of items from the collection, we explored the last hundred years of civil aviation in Britain, from the glamour of flying […]

2023 has seen continued and growing interest in the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collection (LPGDC) for research, outreach and education. Highlights include visits from academic researchers from overseas, the EU and within the UK to the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection (13 days in total); and to the ephemera collections (6 days in […]

Thanks to funding from the Friends of the University we have digitised material from our collections in the Centre for Ephemera Studies that tell us something of the history of Reading. Take a look: ephsmall To celebrate, we invited members of the Friends to visit the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication to see the […]

What was previously the Non-Latin Type Collection is now part of the Type Design Collection. The Type Design Collection also includes type specimens, metal and wooden type and type drawings by leading twentieth-century designers such as those for the development of the New Johnston typeface (1979–81), for Walter Tracy’s Times Europa and Karnak Black typefaces, and […]

We have recently acquired a substantial collection of metal types from St Bride Library, covering over 30 different scripts, and most regions: from Chinese and Japanese, through Cambodian, Tibetan, and Bengali, to Georgian and Syriac, to Egyptian Hieroglyphs and many more: our collections span many of the globe’s typographic writing systems. Watch this space to […]

Borna Izadpanah arranged a visit to the British Library to look at the stunning material in the Asian and African collections there. He wrote about the visit on the Asian and African Studies blog.

Congratulations to Bodil Mostad Olsen who has been awarded her PhD based on a study of printed ephemera. ‘A diachronic study of food labels with a particular focus on verbal and pictorial narratives that are relevant to health’ is about the verbal and visual presentation of health messages on food labels dating from 1850 to […]

Sue Walker and Emma Minns attended a conference about Marie Neurath held at the Gesellshafts- und Wirtschafts Museum in Vienna in October 2022.  Walker gave the keynote lecture ‘Marie Neurath’s books for children: pioneering work in graphic design and illustration’, and Minns as our Assistant Curator, explained the history, scope, legacy and impact of the Otto and […]