‘Type Talks’ booklet – E. B. Eddy Paper Company, Carl Dair, 1948

For the cover of Type Talks Carl Dair uses a collection of jumbled letterforms to alert the reader to the idea that they will now have to look at typefaces in a different way. Note the brush written E/D in the lower left corner of the red block. Dair rarely signed his work but during the partnership with the illustrator Henry Eveleigh he often signed work that was produced by the studio.

A double page spread from Type Talks showing five basic classifications of Latin typefaces. Dair’s classifying of both Sans Serif and Slab Serif simply as ‘contemporary’ indicates just how early this was in the process of classifying of typefaces. It would be another six years before the French typographer Maximilien Vox developed the first systematic arrangement of nine basic type classifications.