Alastair Johnston

Alastair Johnston began his career as a letterpress printer in California in 1970. In 1975, he formed Poltroon Press with the artist Frances Butler. Their first collaboration Confracti Mundi Rudera was later seen as a key work in the emerging artists' book movement. Since 1979, he has taught university-level courses in typography and graphic design. He wrote bibliographies of three Bay Area literary small presses, Auerhahn (1976), White Rabbit (1985) and Zephyrus Image (2003). His study of the literature of 19th-century typefounders’ specimens, Alphabets to Order, was published by the British Library in 2000. He co-edited William E. Loy's Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type with Stephen O. Saxe (Oak Knoll, 2009) and most recently published Typographical Tourists: Tales of the Tramping Printer (Poltroon, 2012). He has just completed a biography and bibliography of Richard Austin, the type cutter, and his son Richard T. Austin, the wood engraver.