Musings from 50 Albemarle Street john r. murray
As a publisher I helped to nourish the variety of the Murray’s list in the fields of history, travel, biography and art and archaeology but my position was always a mix of editor, salesman and administra- tor. One of my side interests was typography and design. When I was young my sister and I were given a small Adana hand printing press. Joe Tanner, director of the Frome printer Butler & Tanner that printed many Murray books, was a friend of my father and kindly supplied us with fonts of Bembo, Baskerville and Gill Sans. We used to print party invitations, Christmas cards, letter headings and suchlike for family and friends. This led to my fascination with printing and during later years I collected a wide range of printers’ specimen type books, books on design as well as runs of Alphabet & Images , Signature and the Newsletters of the Curwen Press. I pursued this particular interest and created a number of books, which I edited, designed and, on one occasion, typeset and bound myself. One of these was A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book . After my father Jock Murray’s death, I decided to make a selection from the enormous number of little blue notebooks in which he’d jot down any quotes, sayings or proverbs he came across whether wise, thoughtful, witty or sometimes simply dotty, and to assemble the best in a slim volume. I added illustrations from our archive by such as Osbert Lancaster, John Piper, John Betjeman, Kathleen Hale of Orlando fame and Johnnie Craxton as well as designs by Edward Bawden, Reynolds Stone and others. To my surprise we sold over 35,000 copies with four reprints. Another book I had fun produc- ing was Old Chestnuts Warmed Up , a volume of narrative verse I learnt by heart at school. Antonia Fraser reviewed it in the Literary Review as ‘an utterly delightful book. Inside you find a plethora of favourites’. Je V Fisher, a friend and well known for the jacket of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin , kindly designed the eye-catching cover
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