B.R.
Paul A. Bennett
Revised and amended from P.M., Vol. II, No. 5, New York, January 1936.
To anyone who has set or handled type, the achievements of Bruce Rogers in combining decorative type units to form a design are extraordinary. This may seem undiluted enthusiasm; actually and sincerely it is but simple fact.
How? Why? Only a detailed examination of a particular B.R. design with type ornaments will reveal. An examination, that is, accompanied by simultaneous scanning of a proof of the individual elements comprising the design. When one sees the units alone—some of them so seemingly useless that one wonders that anything, even second-rate stuff, could possibly be done with such drab material—then one appreciates the typographic magic B.R. has accomplished.
How he sees anything in some of the units he uses so dexterously, I don't know. When and how he first became interested in doing designs with type ornaments is worth considering.
His experiments date back to Riverside Press days, though in that period no attempts were made to use type ornament except by conventional combinations into borders or head-pieces. But even at that time he had several seventeenth-century flowers recut for the decoration of a collection of early American documents, titled Sailors Narratives of Voyages Along the New England Coast, 1524-1624, edited by George Parker Winship.
Interest in combining type ornaments was shown again while at the University Press in Cambridge, England, during 1918-19, but he developed it there into nothing more than the revival of two or three other earlier ornaments which were used, as at Riverside, in conventional ways. A page of his scrapbook shows also a number of trials with Egyptian hieroglyphs, but apparently nothing came of these.