The most exciting graphic design exhibition I’ve seen in London recently is at the St Bride Library, writes Simon Esterson. But its subject would never have admitted to being a designer.

‘Late Letterpress: The Work of Desmond Jeffery’ features the output of a jobbing letterpress printer based in London and Suffolk in the 1950s and 60s. Although Jeffery hated being called a designer (he was a printer who knew how to lay out), he produced Modernist work that few English designers of the period could better.

Above: catalogue for the Partisan coffee-house in London, 1959. Top: Red Paper, 1968.

Most of his work was hand-set in metal type. Jeffery was careful in his choice of typefaces: he was one of the first people in Britain to import sans-serif fonts such as Akzidenz Grotesque from the European typefounders.

Above: poster, 1959.

He had an eclectic range of clients, from art galleries to the brewer Greene King and radical political organisations.

‘Late Letterpress: The Work of Desmond Jeffery’ is at St Bride Library, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EE, until 13 November 2009.

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