ENERGETIC, helpful and scholarly, Justin Howes stood tall in the small world of typographic design and history. Among young typographers, he was a rarity — one who fully appreciated the legacy of letters as physical metal objects, rather than abstractions to be squeezed and manipulated on a screen.

Fascinated by letter forms, he wrote a book about the genesis of London Transport’s Underground typeface, and was curator of the Type Museum in South London. But he did not shun modern technology. On the contrary, he wanted to make computer-based typography and book design as beautiful as the best that had been achieved in previous centuries. To that end he produced a masterly digital version of one of the most famous of all founts, Caslon, and devised computer equivalents of the house rules of the great printing houses of the past.

Justin Howes was born in Solihull in 1963. He became fascinated by printing during his school days at Dulwich College, and before his 18th birthday he was in correspondence with the daughter of Edward Johnston, the Arts and Crafts calligrapher who had inspired Eric Gill. In his early twenties he was to edit Johnston’s Lessons in Formal Writing, together with Heather Child, for Lund Humphries.

In 1982 Howes went to Christ Church, Oxford, on a scholarship to read English, and as an undergraduate he wrote for Isis and contributed an investigative piece to the third issue of the typographical journal Matrix.

His first appointment after Oxford was at the Crafts Study Centre at Bath University, where with a Leverhulme research fellowship he published a catalogue of the Edward Johnston collection (1987). He was to remain committed to the study centre, sitting on its acquisitions committee and designing a number of publications.

The success of the Johnston catalogue attracted the attention of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford, which asked him to investigate its holdings of Edward Bawden material. This led in 1988 to a travelling exhibition and a substantial catalogue.

Howes’s busy freelance life over the next few years included lectures at Oxford, the Royal College of Art and the V&A, as well as designing books for Edinburgh University Press and a redesign of the poetry magazine PN Review. He was also to contribute obituaries to The Times.

Spending the year 1995-96 as a research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, Howes became the young man who lived in a shoe- factory, after buying a dilapidated Victorian building as an economical home. Although he had to dispose of a thousand old shoes and had neither bathroom nor kitchen, his 6,500 sq ft allowed him room for much more important things.

With the spread of computer typesetting, equipment from printing works all over the country has been dispersed throughout the previous decade, and Howes, attracted by the research potential and the idea of printing for himself, had bought two iron presses and a ton of metal type.

One of Howes’s presses was a Stanhope, which had been used at The Times from 1804 to 1814 and subsequently by Gill at Ditchling.

Because metal type can be re-used and is hardwearing, the number of foundries needed by printers has always been limited, so repeatedly through the centuries a successful business has bought out failing rivals and incorporated their wood and metal letters into its own catalogues. This has given British typefounding a continuity hardly matched in any other industry, with artefacts and archives being preserved in a historic flow of hot metal. The last major firm of this kind was Stephenson, Blake Ltd, of Sheffield, which, during the 19th century, came to dominate the market for large typefaces and owned materials stretching back to the Moxon era in the 17th century.

To Howes’s delight, and thanks largely to him, this material was saved for posterity by the Type Museum in 1996. For the past two years, with a grant from the Pilgrim Trust, he had been working part-time as curator of this world-class collection.

Caslon Old Face, the type which Howes digitised for the International Typeface Corporation of New York, was originally cut by William Caslon (1693-1766), who sold it very successfully to London’s printers, giving them a clear face for their books to replace the Dutch types that had previously dominated. Caslon was revived and recut in the 19th century, and again in the 20th century for hot-metal setting and then for photosetting.