John Morgan

His book Usylessly, which explores the non-literary aspects of the 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, was published in December 2021, and in 2025 he established the publishing imprint Ten Thousand Angels Press, whose first title, Usylessly (edition two), will be published later this year, soon followed by Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses, which John completed shortly before he died.

John’s great legacy was to engage with his discipline through all of its assorted historical forms – from gravestones to Vogue covers, from gilded manuscripts to the yellowing pages of pulp fiction – and which he was able to carefully absorb into the lens of his own visual sensibilities. As he wrote once in a published conversation, ‘I am naturally drawn to that warmer branch of British modernism as opposed to the more heroic and self-explicitly cold Swiss modernism, even if it was a Dutchman, the typographer and museum director Willem Sandberg, who gave us that great description of “warm printing”, which celebrates an area of graphic design that delights in the tactility and familiarity of the object. I think it’s important to embrace this tradition. Tradition is not a dirty word and too often misunderstood. How else are you to know what is to be done?’

The quiet radicalism of John’s signature approach to this tradition is revealed in numerous projects and titles, including his groundbreaking redesign of the journal AA Files (issues 57–75) for the Architectural Association, the signage and exhibition graphics he produced for David Chipperfield’s 2012 architecture biennale in Venice, which riffed off the city’s stencilled typographic vernacular and the series of reimagined literary classics (among them, Dracula and Vanity Fair) he designed for Four Corners Books. Among many other publications, he worked on several Park Books titles, including two very recent publications – Tom Emerson’s Dirty Old River and the new Gumshoe series of titles, initiated with Françoise Fromonot’s The House of Dr Koolhaas. The brilliance of John Morgan’s work, but also his kindness and generosity, will be hugely missed.

—Thomas Weaver