Last word
Letter-carver
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Reynolds Stone died last Saturday, not long after his 70th birthday. He was the finest wood-engraver of his generation and perhaps the finest English lettering artist of the century. I choose the words carefully: Stone was not a typographer nor a calligrapher. His life's work was carving—carving pictures and words, on stone but still more on wood. In a civilised country and in a civilised age such a man would have been garlanded with honours and his death would have been major news. As it was I searched in vain through the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian on Monday for any mention of his name.
Stone was educated at Eton, where both his father and his grandfather had taught. He was not a scholarly child, and it took him some time to find his true vocation, though he had painted in water colours from the time he was ten. After Cambridge he worked briefly as an apprentice printer at the Cambridge Press under Walter Lewis. While an undergraduate he had been 'bowled over' by a Samuel Palmer in a friend's house; he had bought from David's bookshop a copy of Thomas Bewick's Quadrupeds (for a shilling!) which began a life-long love; and he became a woodengraver.
It may be worth explaining what woodengraving is. A woodcut is carved with the grain, on the soft, side of a block of wood. This is the technique which from Diirer's time on has been much more common than wood-engraving — the method which Bewick and Stone used — in which the endgrain of a piece of boxwood is incised.
I have remarked before how some arts and crafts spring to life fully armed. Printing was invented in the 15th century, and the achievements of its first 80 years have not been improved on; Haydn more or less created the string quartet, and no one has written better quartets since. Bewick had precursors, but few and obscure, and in his lifetime, at the end of the 18th century, his art suddenly reached an apogee which has not since been surpassed (as I am sure Stone would have agreed, though he much admired the engraved books of the 1850s and 1860s).
When he took up engraving in his early twenties Stone left printing behind. He had become aware of the printing and lettering revival movement led by Stanley Morison and associated with the names of Beatrice Warde and Francis Meynell. It was inevitable that he would come under the influence of Eric Gill: he met him in the early Thirties, and stayed at Pigotts, Gill's house, where he also met David Jones and Rene Hague. One cannot now look at Stone's work without being conscious of Gill but, in my own view at least, Stone was the greater carver. I may be prejudiced by an antipathy to the Gill milieu of intense Catholicism, radical-primitive politics and sex-asreligion. A bat's squeak in an autobiographical fragment by Stone — 'I knew that I would have had to escape if anyone had asked me to stay [at Pigotts]'— suggests that he may have felt the same. That aside, there is something lacking in Gill's work — a certain nervelessness or femininity (if one may still use the word figuratively without being accused of `sexism'). His type designs have not worn well. There is a period charm about the Gill Sans blocking on the backstrips of pre-war Gollancz books but, as many typographers have found, his other faces — Perpetua, for example — melt on the page as you use them. Nothing could be less true of Stone's lettering.
From the moment that Stone began to engrave his genius was apparent. It is astonishing to look at his early engravings and think that they are the work of a 23or 24-year-old who has just learned the craft. Never have medium and master so quickly clicked: see the early pages of Reynolds Stone: Engravings (John Murray f20); indeed, see that lovely book throughout. He rapidly mastered the miniature illustrative technique of Bewick, cutting little landscapes and animal portraits.
His range was soon extended. Throughout his life, in answer to private and public commissions, he carved a large variety of decorative cuts; Bewickesque vignettes; book-jackets; armorial bookplates; publisher's devices (the Hart-Davis fox, the Hamish Hamilton book and oak tree); superb revisions of the Oxford book and crown's and of the Cambridge lions; stamps; banknotes (the 1963 fiver, since superseded by inferior designs); no man can have engraved the Royal Arms so often, or with such ingenuity of contrivance.
Though I love and revere Stone's illustrative and decorative engravings I think that his purest genius is to be found in his carved lettering. At the end of the 1930s he taught himself to carve letters in stone. He subsequently cut many noble memorials, from Churchill's and Eliot's in Westminster Abbey to simple gravestones in country churchyards.
But fine as these are, his most perfect lettering was done for the printed page: numberless, elegant, relaxed book labels; formal title pages; colophons; chapter headings. His repertoire was surprisingly limited: he stuck to the simple, magnificent Roman' capitals lauded by Morison. But what simplicity and what magnificence he achieved with them! It is hard to think of any more powerful or more lovely lettering than the pages which Stone cut for The Typographic Book (1963), or, simpler still, the title pieces and colophons cut for John Sparrow's series of Lapidaria. 1 mourn his passing, but venerate these memorials he has left.
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