Anthony Blond was a British publishing house founded in 1958 by Anthony Bernard Blond (1928-2008), a maverick publisher known for taking on experimental and provocative authors that more conservative firms avoided.[1] The company’s 1962 logotype was designed by the London agency Fletcher, Forbes, Gill, the influential partnership of Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes and Bob Gill formed that same year.[2][3]
Design and History
The Anthony Blond mark is a logotype built from the publisher’s initials, A and B, rendered as outlined letterforms.[2] It was created in 1962, the same year Fletcher, Forbes, Gill was established in London.[3] The studio, which combined Swiss modernist restraint with the wit of Madison Avenue advertising, counted Pirelli, the BBC, London Airport and Penguin Books among its clients during this period.[4]
The identity was produced for the publishing house during a period of rapid expansion for Blond, who had founded the firm in 1958 and by the 1960s was publishing some 70 new authors, including Simon Raven, Isabel Colegate and David Benedictus.[1] A related mark for Blond Educational, the company’s school textbook imprint launched in 1962, was also designed by Fletcher, Forbes, Gill the following year, using the same outlined initial approach with the letters B and E.[5]
Meaning and Symbolism
The logotype is classified as an initials-based mark, using the two-letter monogram A and B to stand for the publisher’s name.[2] The outlined treatment of the letters gives the mark a light, open appearance consistent with the studio’s ideas-driven approach to graphic design in the early 1960s.[3] No documented account of additional symbolic meaning beyond the initials has been recorded.
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