Typography, when done well, is an invisible craft. No one understood this better than the book designer George Mackie, who has died aged 100. He brought an artist’s sensibility and a craftsman’s care to his work, but never forgot that its chief aim, “the congenial readability of continuous text”, as he put it, is rarely improved by stylistic flourishes. He was elected a Royal Designer for Industry in 1973.
From the early 1950s to the late 1980s he worked on more than 400 titles for the Edinburgh University Press. The text pages of books he produced were classical in design, often set in Monotype’s early-20th-century revivals of Renaissance and Enlightenment typefaces. But where there was the opportunity, he took pleasure in making EUP’s scholarly titles livelier, with his illustrator’s eye and sense of composition. He made striking use of binding, title pages, chapter openings and decorative endpapers, often using his own illustrations and hand lettering.
In 1991 the National Library of Scotland mounted an exhibition of his work. In a “cautionary note” in the catalogue, Mackie warned visitors that books are not best experienced in glass cases. “The book, a three-dimensional object that, if well-made, invites handling as a prelude to reading, is not easily exhibited. It gives pleasure to the touch, even to the nose.”
Mackie considered himself fortunate in having as a patron Archie Turnbull, secretary of the Edinburgh University Press from 1952 to 1987, as he acknowledged in the title of an essay written in 1988 for the design journal Matrix: Designing for an Enlightened Publisher. Turnbull initially commissioned covers and title pages from Mackie, but soon entrusted him with the design of entire books (Turnbull did not extend his faith to the authors of the books, who were allowed no say in how they would be made).
Their long professional relationship was largely carried on by mail, Turnbull sending briefings from Edinburgh and Mackie responding, after days working at Gray’s Art School in Aberdeen (now part of Robert Gordon University), where he headed the department of design and crafts (1956-80). He designed the books from home in the evenings and at weekends, and his prodigious part-time output is all the more impressive in that most of it was done for pre-digital letterpress printing, where intricate and precise specifications are needed before metal type is expensively set. The shape of the book had to be made in preparatory sketches, and in the mind, long before it reached the page.
His first work as a freelance designer and illustrator was undertaken in parallel with a job teaching design in the department of printing at Heriot-Watt College (now University) in Edinbugh in the early 1950s. Initially he found that the printed results of his work were depressingly inferior to what he thought he had worked out on the drawing board. A friend advised him that, to get better results, he should arrive at the printing works as soon as they opened in the morning to talk through the work with the compositors who would be putting his designs on press.
This was the beginning of a self-education in the techniques and history of printing, and designing for print, which gave him his deep knowledge of all the processes needed to take a typescript and turn it into a printed book.
Mackie was born in Cupar, Fife. He never knew his mother, Kathleen (nee Grantham), who died a month after he was born. His father, David Mackie, like his before him, was a saddler. After school in Cupar, George studied at Dundee School of Art.
In 1940 he enlisted in the RAF. After more than a dozen combat missions piloting Stirlings for Bomber Command, he was transferred to Training Command. It is as likely as not that this saved his life, bomber crew casualties at that time being around 50%. At the end of the war he joined Transport Command, flying the imperial supply route to India.
After his six years in the RAF, he completed his formal training at Edinburgh College of Art, which in those days shared its premises with offices issuing bread coupons. He left the college “without instruction or regrets”.
While in Edinburgh he met the artist Barbara Balmer (who was later to provide many of the covers for the Virago Modern Classics series). They married in 1952, and had two daughters, Rachel and Ruth. From 1956 the family lived in Cults, Aberdeenshire, and in 1981 he and Barbara moved to Stamford, Lincolnshire, where they had discovered a large 17th-century townhouse for sale after making a wrong turn while driving from London to Aberdeen. Barbara had her studio at the top of the house, and George assembled a printshop in the basement.
He remained thoughtful about his service in the RAF, for which he was awarded the DFC in 1944, wondering at having been entrusted with the training of flyers when he was still relatively inexperienced himself. In 2012 he largely agreed with Jonathan Meades’ damning assessment of the Bomber Command Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in the London Review of Books. In a letter to the paper he wrote: “The long absence after the war of any formal recognition in stone was creating an increasingly powerful silence where all manner of feelings of revulsion or acclaim were felt. No solid memorial could express so clearly today’s ambivalence.”
Barbara died in 2017, and his daughter Rachel in March this year. He is survived by Ruth, two granddaughters, Clara and Emily, and two great-granddaughters, Indie and Minnie.
• George Alexander Mackie, book designer and artist, born 17 July 1920; died 3 October 2020
