Double Crown Club

The Double Crown Club is a dining club and society of printers, publishers, book designers and illustrators in London that was founded in the 1920s. Among its early members was the typographer Stanley Morison.

According to Sir Sydney Roberts, writing in his 1966 memoir "Adventures With Authors," the founding of the Double Crown came during a "typographical renaissance which had a notable influence on book-production." While the 1890s saw new standards being applied, Roberts wrote, it was not until after World War I that "publishers as a whole began to recognize that the basic principles of book design could, and should, be exemplified as clearly in a half-crown textbook as in a three-guinea edition de luxe."^[1]

The first president, Roberts writes, was Holbrook Jackson. In 1924, Roberts was a member of the club's original committee along with Frank Sidgwick, Hubert J. Foss, Oliver Simon and Gerard Meynell.

The club was meant to foster the exchange of ideas on "good printing" and was to meet no fewer than four times a year, and no more than six times.

The name refers to a size of paper, but Roberts writes, it also was chosen because the club planned to "crown" two books a year. That tradition ended in 1927. But one tradition remained -- the typography for the menu for each dinner was handled by a member. The first dinner was October 31, 1924, with Simon designing the menu. ^[2]

References and footnotes

1. "Adventures With Authors" - memoir about printing in Britain. Accessed 18 November 2009.
2. "Adventures With Authors" - memoir about printing in Britain. Accessed 18 November 2009.