Beatrice Warde, 1900–1969, type historian, author, lecturer, publicity manager for Monotype Corporation, Great Britain.
“What I’m really good at is standing up in front of an audience with no preparation at all, then for 50 minutes refusing to let them even wriggle an ankle.”1 Allan Haley: Typographic Milestones. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken 1992, p. 129.
Born in New York City, Beatrice Lamberton Becker, daughter of a journalist and a composer, found her calling at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where she was introduced to calligraphy and became interested in letterforms. While at Barnard College, she met Frederic Warde, her future husband, and Bruce Rogers. Rogers helped her get a job as assistant to the librarian at the American Type Founders Company, Henry Lewis Bullen, a disciple of Theodore Low DeVinne. (“The reader does not want to see the printer but to hear the writer.”2 DaVinne quoted in Type & typography: Highlights from Matrix, the review for printers and bibliophiles, West New York, N.J. : Mark Batty, Publisher, 2003, p. 6.). In 1925, she and Frederic moved to England, each to work with Stanley Morison. On the basis of essays written under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon, Monotype hired Beatrice as editor of its house journal and soon made her its dynamic and imaginative publicity manager. In this job that straddled both art and commerce, she continued to navigate the boy’s club of typography with charm and aplomb for the rest of her life. She had strong opinions, but was not inflexible. With a flair for metaphor and a sympathy, respect and affection for both the book trade and the advertising world, she demonstrated a true gift to galvanize the print industry around the nobility of its core mission: effective and aesthetic typography.
Most likely Beatrice Warde met Ismar David during one of her many lecture tours in the United States. Hortense Mendel David sent Warde a copy of the Genesis pages for Liber Librorum in 1956. As evidenced by Warde’s reply, the two women were on a first name basis. David and Warde certainly saw each other on the TDC’s trip to London and Paris in 1966.
Warde never abandoned the skills she learned as a teenager at Horace Mann, where “[t]hey gave me a lettering pen and taught me the great secret of calligraphy and good handwriting, the italic hand…”3Beatrice Warde, in a radio interview recorded in Adelaide, Austrailia in 1959. She customarily used her italic hand in a personal Christmas newsletter, which she had printed with space to address each recipient individually on what she called her “Eve of All Friends.”
In 1967, after sending Warde his own greeting card with some photos he had taken of her with Ismar and Dorothy David, Burt Carnes made a copy of her reply and sent it on to the Davids.
