Morgan Press was a printing and typography company based in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, established in 1958 by brothers Douglas and Lloyd Morgan. The firm built its reputation on a vast collection of rare 19th-century American wood type and foundry faces, which it offered to designers and helped fuel the Victorian revival style of the 1960s. The visual identity most associated with Morgan Press is not a conventional corporate mark but the catalog designs created for the company by illustrator and graphic designer John Alcorn, who was a member of Push Pin Studios at the time.[1]
Design and History
John Alcorn designed the “Wood and Foundry Type” catalogs for Morgan Press, interpreting the Victorian decorative pastiche of the company’s type collection in a style that has since made those catalogs collector’s items.[1] The 1968 volume, titled “The Headliners Present in Process Lettering: More Morgan, Vol. 2,” was a 64-page specimen book printed by Morgan Press with catalog design credited to Alcorn.[2] The catalog presented 129 “new” Morgan faces, described in the introduction as “resurrected, restored, retouched, reborn.”[2]
Alcorn’s work for Morgan Press combined rare 19th-century American wooden letters with the varied trends of the 1960s, and his hand-lettering skills were tested extensively at the publishing house.[3] The catalog covers and specimen pages functioned as de facto brand expressions for Morgan Press, showcasing the company’s type inventory through Alcorn’s distinctive, playful lettering and layout choices.
Meaning and Symbolism
The Morgan Press type faces revived, or were elaborations on, high Victorian and art nouveau alphabets, particularly the larger wood types used for advertising and posters.[4] The designed examples in the 1968 catalog targeted a hip, contemporary audience, with one page reminding readers that “love is all you need.”[4] This pairing of antique letterforms with 1960s countercultural messaging reflected the era’s eclectic revivalist graphic mannerisms, a direction championed by Push Pin Studios, which rejected the cold uniformity of Modernist design.[1]
Alcorn also produced other visual material for Morgan Press, including a 1968 art calendar executed in pen and ink with flat color overlays, for which Morgan Press was the copyright claimant.[5]
Typography and Design
The 1968 catalog was printed with black ink and several spot colors, with each type specimen accompanied by guide lines for ordering.[2] Although the faces shown were not type in the proper sense but photoprocess lettering, the catalog was described by one collector as “as close to a psychedelic type catalogue as I’ve seen.”[4] The Morgan Press type collection itself was later housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.[1]
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