Writing Biography and something from Mike's days running Linotype Typography

Still having medical complications from my surgery but feeling a bit better and the pain is tolerable.

The following publication was very influential during its existence, to Linotype, its partner  ITC and the rest of the graphics world.  I saw this announcement from Alan and thought it may have interest to this blogs readers:

U&lc back issues to be made available

by Allan Haley

Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term as 

president of the United States in 1974 – and shortly there after became embroiled in the Watergate scandal that caused him to resign the office. In that same year the first hand held cellular phone call was made, “The Godfather, Part II” won best movie of the year at the Academy Awards, and Secretariat became the first horse in over 25 years to win U.S. horseracing’s triple crown.

ITC also began publishing U&lc, The Interna­tional Journal of Typographics in 1974. Herb Lubalin was the editorial and art director of the first issue and his seminal design set the stage for future issues of trendsetting and award 

winning editorial creations.

The modest 24-page first issue declared, “U&lc will provide a panoramic win­dow, a showcase for the world of graphic arts – a clearing house for the inter­national exchange of ideas and information.”

And, indeed, it did.

Over the 26 years that it was published, U&lc gathered a following of thou­sands of avid readers that eagerly anticipated each issue. It became the most important typographic 

publication of its time.

While a couple of years lacked a full complement, U&lc was published quarterly, in its – large format – tabloid size, until the fall of 1999. Early pub­lications were limited to black and white, and color was introduced in 1988.

Even though U&lc ceased publication over 10 years ago, we continue to receive weekly requests for back issues and reprints of specific articles. Unfortunately, because we have a limited supply of the hard copy issues, we have been unable to fulfill these requests.

Thanks to technology, this has changed. Over this summer, we had a complete set of the publication scanned as high and low resolution files. Today, we are happy to announce that we will be mak ing these scans avail able as down load­able Adobe® Acrobat® PDF doc u ments – and the files will be searchable.

Every month, we will make one volume (a year’s worth of publications) available through the Fonts.com blog. There are, however, a couple of caveats. First, the files are big – as in “way big.” The low-resolution files can be as big as 18 MBand the high-resolution files are down right huge at over 85 MB in some cases. Second, they are not perfect. The original documents were some times faded, cracked or torn. That combined with a semi-automated scanning process (over 9,000 pages scaned) resulted in some unavoidable “character” traits. The final caveat is that the above plan could change depending on audience interest level (or lack thereof).