The Jocelyn Herbert Archive

Baal by Bertolt Brecht. Illustration by Jocelyn Herbert

Wimbledon College of Arts is part of the University of the Arts London (UAL) and they hold archive material relating to film and theatre designs, as well as the Jocelyn Herbert Archive. Jocelyn Herbert (1917-2003) was a theatre and set designer, who worked within many theatre companies and she left a substantial amount of information on her work for different theatres including the Royal Court and National Theatre. The collection includes original costume and set designs, letters, masks, puppets, set mock-ups, photographs and notebooks.

This simple piece of literature has been produced to give information about the archive, research possibilities and the Jocelyn Herbert Award which is given bi-annually.

It is a simple 8pp, self cover, printed offset litho in two colour, black and a special orange. the images are reproduced as monotones/halftones Size is 225x160mm portrait. It is printed on our StarFine Natural White 100gsm, which gives the publication a light feel with a neutral white which works well with the mono images.

An interesting thing about this project is that the designer on the project Daniel McGhee, didn't want to saddle stitch - sometimes 8pp with a saddle stitch just feels a bit "leaflety"! He had previously seen some jobs which had glue along the spine and wondered how and if that could be done.

This process is usually called "seam glue" or sometime spine glue and can be done on literature with a small number of pages - generally only 8pp on an A4 size or up to 16pp on an A5. It is a machine process which runs a small seam of glue along the spine. The advantage is that there is no bulky stitch, which can sometimes look ugly but the disadvantage is that it makes the 'read-overs' virtually impossible as it takes about 5mm out of the spine. It is not an easy thing to photograph but hopefully these show it well enough

I've deliberately formed a crease, to give an idea of where the glue is hidden

Design is by Atelier Dreibholz and the creative director is Paulus Dreibholz. Designer on the project is Daniel McGhee and thanks to Daniel for the kind note and file copies.

Excellent print and finishing is by Robert Young at R.Young & Son in Croydon.

http://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/library-services/collections-and-archives/wimbledon/
http://www.dreibholz.com/
http://www.ryoungprint.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 05.02.2015