The Fleuron VII, edited by Stanley Morison and published in 1930, represents the final and perhaps most celebrated issue of this landmark journal of typography . As the seventh and concluding volume of a series that began in 1923 under the editorship of Oliver Simon, this edition was produced at Cambridge University Press and simultaneously published in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday Doran and Company.
The substantial quarto volume runs to 253 pages of text plus 25 pages of advertisements, profusely illustrated with line blocks, facsimiles, folding collotype plates, and mounted or tipped-in specimens of typographic design . A limited edition of 1,000 copies was printed by Walter Lewis at Cambridge University Press, with an additional 210 deluxe copies issued on English hand-made wove paper, signed by Morison in the colophon and containing extra inserts not present in the standard issue.
The contents represent a summit of typographical scholarship. Notable contributions include Paul Beaujon—the pseudonym of Beatrice Warde—on “The Typographical Work of Eric Gill,” accompanied by numerous illustrations including a photogravure of Gill’s sculpture Madonna and Child, wood engravings, and a 31-page setting of “The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity” printed in Gill’s Perpetua type . In deluxe copies, the Perpetua specimen page bears Gill’s ink signature . Additional essays include J. van Krimpen on modern printing in the Netherlands, Friedrich Ewald on the Officina Bodoni with tipped-in specimens, Rudolf Koch on Heinrich Holz, A.J.A. Symons on the typography of the eighteen-nineties, and perhaps most influentially, Morison’s own “First Principles of Typography,” which distilled decades of theory into a foundational statement of modern typographic practice.
The volume also includes type reviews, book reviews, and a comprehensive 25-page index for the entire seven-volume run. Bound in brown cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. Contemporary reviews praised the volume as “fully packed with sound scholarship and beautiful examples of fine printing,” noting the international character Morison brought to the series. The Fleuron VII remains an indispensable resource for understanding the typographic renaissance of the early twentieth century.
