Frederic Warde

Frederic Warde (1894-1939), typographic designer. He was born in Wells, Minnesota, enlisted in the United States Army in 1915 and attended the Army School of Military Aeronautics at the University of California (Berkeley) during 1917-1918. On demobilisation he worked as a book editor for Macmillan & Co before undergoing training on the Monotype machine, after which he worked for the printers Edwin Rudge. He had met Beatrice Becker in 1919 and they married in December 1922. Warde was Printer for Princeton University (1922-1924). The couple moved to England in late 1924 for Warde had been offered work by the typographer Stanley Morison, designing for The Fleuron and the Monotype Recorder. The marriage did not last; they separated in 1926, and quickly divorced, though the break-up was an amicable one.

Warde lived in Fance and Italy, where he became involved in Giovanni Mardersteig’s Officina Bodoni. Warde designed a type version of the the chancery cursive letter forms of Renaissance calligrapher Ludovico degli Arrighi. Mardersteig printed in 1926 The Calligraphic Manual of Ludovico Arrighi - complete Facsimile, with an introduction by Stanley Morison which Warde issued in Paris while working for the Pleiad Press.

The Monotype Corporation published in 1928 Warde's Printers Ornaments on the Monotype

Warde returned to America permenantly and he worked again for Rudge 1927-1932, and also designed for private presses such as Crosby Gaige, the Watch Hill Press, Bowling Green Press, the Limited Editions Club and Heritage Press. Warde worked as production manager for the American office of the Oxford University Press from 1937 until his death in 1939.

Online links

The Grolier Club in New York has an archive of Warde's papers [1] The biographical notes there are the basis of this article.