John Dreyfus was an important figure in postwar European type design, as typographical adviser to the British Monotype Corporation in succession to Stanley Morison, at a time when the technology of typesetting was undergoing enormous change; as President of the Association Typographique Internationale at a time when typeface protection was becoming of urgent importance; and as a designer and writer. A recital of his distinguished appointments, however, cannot convey his authority or the generosity of his informal guidance to many in the fields of book design and printing history.

John Gustave Dreyfus came from a cosmopolitan background: his father was from a Basle banking family and moved to London in 1895 to set up a stockbroking business; his mother was from Paris. He went to school at Oundle, and then read economics at Trinity College, Cambridge. There his growing interest in typography led him to apply for a graduate traineeship at Cambridge University Press, although this was delayed by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Dreyfus volunteered for army service, but while waiting for orders to report for duty he helped Brooke Crutchley, then the assistant university printer, in putting together an exhibition of printing at the Fitzwilliam Museum which opened in May 1940 to celebrate the quincentenary of Gutenberg’s invention.

This showed not only the well-known milestones of the history of the book — from Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible to its descendant designed by Bruce Rogers in 1935 — but also emphasised the contribution made by printing to the advancement of knowledge.

The Cambridge exhibition was dismantled after only a few days when the invasion of the Netherlands brought Cambridge within range of German bombers, but its guiding principles were followed in the landmark exhibition Printing and the Mind of Man, held in London in 1963. Dreyfus was also involved in the planning of this later exhibition, and he designed both the catalogue, printed at Oxford University Press, and the sumptuous commemorative volume which was printed at Cambridge a few years afterwards and which remains an excellent guide to the most significant printed books of all eras.

Dreyfus spent much of the war as an ambulance driver, was promoted to captain, and later transferred to the Education Corps. In June 1945 he found himself in the Amsterdam area, in the recently liberated Netherlands. He had been asked by Stanley Morison to visit the distinguished type designer Jan van Krimpen, whom no one in England had heard from during the war. The Dutch had endured a hard winter with severe shortages of food and fuel, and Dreyfus later wrote of Mrs Van Krimpen’s delight at being brought a tin of ham.

The subsequent relationship with Van Krimpen, fruitful though never easy (since he was a hard man to please), involved overseeing the Monotype cutting of his last typeface Spectrum, and also the handsome book Dreyfus wrote on his work to celebrate his 60th birthday in 1952.

After the war Dreyfus returned to Cambridge University Press, becoming assistant university printer from 1949 to 1955, when he succeeded Morison at Monotype. He remained typographic adviser to Cambridge, as Morison had been before him. Dreyfus’s years at Monotype coincided with the momentous shift from hot-metal typesetting to photosetting and then digital character generation. The first Monophoto machine went into service a couple of years after his arrival, and a year after his retirement in 1982, Adobe announced work on the PostScript page-description language.

Throughout this period Monotype maintained the production of hot-metal systems side by side with new technology; but while the early years in the type-drawing office were spent adapting the best-known metal types for film, increasingly the trend was towards new designs for new processes. The last major new face to be cut in metal was Jan Tschichold’s Sabon in 1966. A few years before that Monotype had begun producing the extensive Univers family of sans-serifs in metal and film, and Dreyfus also commissioned the first new types designed for film alone, Apollo and Photina.

Among John Dreyfus’s writings were two of the delectable series of Cambridge Christmas Books, on Baskerville’s punches and on Edward Johnston’s Cranach Press italic type; he also produced a study of Van Krimpen, a major history of the Nonesuch Press, and the story of the Golden Cockerel Press edition of The Four Gospels, with its magnificent type and engravings by Eric Gill, as well as much editorial work. A selection of Dreyfus’s essays was published by the British Library in 1994 as Into Print.

He was president of the Printing Historical Society in Britain and a laureate of its American sister organisation, European representative for the Limited Editions Club from 1956 to 1977, and a recipient of the American Goudy Award (1984) and the German Gutenberg Prize (1996). Elected to the Double Crown Club in 1947, he was its longest standing member, and had been president.

John Dreyfus married Irène Thurnauer in 1948. They had two daughters, and a son, Michael, who was killed in a car accident in Kenya at the age of 30.

John Dreyfus, typographer, was born on April 15, 1918. He died on December 29, 2002, aged 84.