PM and AD^55The Composing Room of New York was no mere type
shop. It was the vortex of progressive design activity from
the late 1930 s to the 1960 s. No other type business
promoted itself more aggressively, or so determinedly
advanced the art and craft of type design, and in the
process made such a significant contribution to practice
and history. What began as a campaign to attract
typesetting business from advertising agencies and book
and magazine publishers evolved into one of the most
ambitious educational programs that the field has ever
known. It initiated type clinics, lecture series, single and
group exhibitions, catalogs, and one of America’s most
influential graphic arts periodicals,PM(Production
Manager), later called AD(Art Director), published
bimonthly between 1934 and 1942.
The program, conceived and sustained for
almost forty years by The Composing Room’s cofounder,
Dr. Robert Lincoln Leslie ( 1885 – 1986 ), was rooted in
graphic arts traditions yet was motivated by his personal
willingness to identify and promote significant new
approaches even if they rejected tradition. What made
The Composing Room so profoundly influential, in
addition to being a recognized leader in quality hot-metal
type and eventually photo-typesetting, was a commitment
to explore design approaches with a blind eye toward
style or ideology. Despite his own preference for classical
practice, “Doc” Leslie (he was a licensed physician) or
“Uncle Bob,” as he was affectionately called, gave young
designers a platform on which to strut their stuff.
Leslie assumed that a well-informed professional—indeed an
enlightened one—would be a more discerning customer and so in a corner
of his shop he created a graphic arts salon. Regularly frequented by
Ladislav Sutnar, Alvin Lustig, and Herbert Bayer, this salon put his type
shop at the center of what would now be called “design discourse,” but then
was practical design talk. The Composing Room’s unparalleled efforts to
elevate the level of graphic arts and typography may have been driven by