The work of Reynolds Stone, born in 1909, is celebrated this week in a centenary exhibition in a London gallery. But almost everyone in the land already possesses a work of art by Reynolds Stone, without knowing it, stored in a drawer. The British passport, designed by Stone in 1955, bears his engraving of the royal coat of arms and his elegant lettering. And you are reading a newspaper whose masthead, Court Circular page coat of arms and leader-page clock device were all once designed or redesigned by Stone, one of the greatest letterers of the 20th century.

Like everything he executed, the passport and the Times headings have a timeless rightness about them: formality without bombast; balance and composure. They were the work of a contented and unpretentious man, who practised his artistic craft quietly in deepest Dorset, in an 18th-century rectory at Litton Cheney, surrounded by ancient trees and springs and waterfalls in an untamed garden of five acres, within the sound of the sea at Chesil Beach.

He sketched and painted outdoors, loving every detail of the countryside, its mosses and wild flowers and weeds and streams; he would have been content never to leave his garden, and resisted London and the modern world.

He had no art training. He was the son and grandson of Eton classics masters (so he was born in college), and his mother had studied drawing under Henry Tonks. As a boy he made model ships out of wood, and built cranes and engines, and was a keen observer of natural life.

He took a history degree at Cambridge, where he started engraving for printing on metal and wood. A young don arranged for him to be apprenticed to the Cambridge University Press, where the typographical adviser was the great Stanley Morison, creator of our Times New Roman typeface in 1932. He also met (by chance, on a train) his hero, the sculptor and master letter cutter Eric Gill, who shared with him a preference for classic Roman capitals, and taught him much about letter design and cutting.

“By good fortune,” Stone wrote, “I learnt to see the craft as an art.”

He spent a fortnight at Gill’s house, Pigotts, where Gill’s Prospero and Ariel for the BBC reposed in a barn, almost finished. He also devoured the work of Thomas Bewick, and admired the engravings of Gwen Raverat.

Theirs was the kind of work to which Stone would devote his life: wood engraving, in which lines are incised across the end grain of a piece of boxwood, exactly as in metal engraving, with a graver. He also practised the more elaborate 16th-century italic style, with flourishes — fronds and curlicues — which embellished many of the beautiful bookplates and letterheads he made for friends and clients. The bookplates first drew him to critical attention in 1934.

He taught himself to engrave in wood and cut letters on stone, and for the next 40 years he perfected his alphabets, his calligraphy and his scrupulously executed armorial devices and inscriptions. He designed the “Victory” or “peace” 3d stamp in 1946, the £5 note in 1963 and the £10 note in 1964, using as model for Britannia his daughter Phillida, who sat on a chair with a broom in one hand and a dustbin-lid in the other.

No household-name fame accrued, but his work became distinctively recognisable: poetic, distinguished by its certainty, clarity, economy, simplicity, harmony and taste.

Friends flocked to Litton Cheney, summoned by Stone’s wife Janet, the photographer, who would invite people to come and stay “as often, and for as long, as they liked”. Their visitors included John Betjeman, L. P. Hartley, Edward Ardizzone, Cecil Day-Lewis, Benjamin Britten, Iris Murdoch, John Sparrow, Frances Partridge, John Piper and Laurence Whistler.

Stone had no studio; he preferred to tuck himself away in the far corner of the large book-lined drawing-room.

“When engraving,” Stone’s daughter Emma wrote of her father, “he worked next to a darkly overgrown window, by Anglepoise lamp, in the almost underwater light from the window.”

In baggy jumper with leather-patched elbows (while house-guests sat chatting and reading and played music) he would engrave the wood, blowing away the slivers, rub French chalk into the lines, blow away the surplus chalk, until the image was revealed; then he would ink the block, and lay on the inked surface a sheet of Japanese handmade paper.

Emma described the chaos of his dusty workbench, littered with bird skeletons and cracked china cups, discarded boxwood blocks bought from Mr Lawrence of Bleeding Heart Yard in London, scattered engraving tools, French chalk, half-finished tubes of white gouache paint, and the jawbone of a fox.

“Out of this muddle of dusty, cobwebbed clutter he produced his pristine work; images and lettering of deft precision and often visionary beauty.”

He would always check the balance of his letterforms by looking at them in a small handbag mirror borrowed from his wife – after whom he named his Janet typeface.

Not surprisingly, his four children, growing up in this idyllic setting, all pursued fine art: Edward, a painter; Humphrey, typographer; Phillida Gili, illustrator and writer of children’s books; and Emma Beck, art historian.

You can still see Reynolds Stone’s work everywhere today. He engraved Winston Churchill’s memorial in Westminster Abbey, and T. S. Eliot’s; Benjamin Britten’s headstone in Aldeburgh churchyard; the Prince Charles’s book plate at the time for his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969. He illustrated many books, and colophons for publishers and libraries, and collaborated with John Piper and Benjamin Britten.

In 1954 he created a typeface, Minerva, for linotype, to complement Eric Gill’s Pilgrim. He designed the lettering for the Dolcis shoe shops on every high street.

At his memorial service in St James’s Piccadilly on July 20, 1979, Iris Murdoch gave the address. “He was,” she said, “well equipped to be a happy inhabitant of this planet.”

Reynolds Stone: Lettering, Logos and Landscapes, runs from Nov 6-21, Tues-Fri, 11am-4pm, Sat 10.30am-6pm, at Schneideman Gallery, 331 Portobello Rd, London W10 (0208 354 7365); reynoldsstone.co.uk