Professor James Mosley, a Memoir

Professor James Mosley, a Memoir

Eric Kindel

Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK (e.t.kindel[at]reading.ac.uk)

Excerpt: James Mosley, who died on 25 August 2025, was a historian of letterforms, type, typography, and printing. From 1958 until 2000 he was librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, and from 1960 until 2021 he taught at University of Reading in what became the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. Underpinning both roles was Mosley’s peerless scholarship, which was both expansive and distinguished by the particular attention he devoted to cultures of letterforms in Britain and two other countries for which he felt a great affection, Italy and France. As teacher, advisor, and mentor to students and colleagues at Reading, he brought to these roles his knowledge and the exemplary research, writing, and publishing that were features of it. The remarks that follow offer a brief account of Mosley’s work at the place of learning where he taught for more than six decades, with the intention of memorializing his contributions and their lasting value.

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Author

Eric Kindel is Professor of Graphic Communication in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading. He joined Reading in 1998 and served as Head of Department from 2015 until 2024. After meeting James Mosley in 1995, he twice attended Mosley’s lecture series and collaborated with him on a research project to reconstruct the stencilling equipment and method of Gilles Filleau des Billettes.

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Cite this article:
Kindel, E. (2025). Professor James Mosley, a memoir. Visible Language, 59(3), 432–438. https://www.visible-language.org/journal/issue-59-3-james-mosley/

First published online May 22, 2025. © 2025 Visible Language — this article is open access, published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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