Perpetua Press

Vivian Hughes Ridler, CBE (2 October 1913–11 January 2009), was a printer, typographer and scholar in Britain. He was Printer to the University of Oxford at Oxford University Press from 1958 until his retirement in 1978; and also established his own Perpetua Press.

Vivian Ridler was born in Britain on 2 October 1913, at Cardiff. When he was a boy, he and his family moved to Bristol. While still at Bristol Grammar School, he became interested in printing and typography. He bought an Adana platen, and with his friend, David Bland (who had a Wharfedale), established the Perpetua Press, a private press which they ran between 1931 and 1936. One year their Fifteen Old Nursery Rhymes was chosen as one of the fifty best books of the year. During this time Ridler met Eric Gill and Douglas Cleverdon. After school he served a short apprenticeship at the Bristol firm of E. S. and A. Robinson.

Ridler got to know John Johnson, then Printer to the University of Oxford, and in 1936 went to Oxford to help the Assistant Printer, Charles Batey. In the late 1930s Ridler moved from Oxford to London, to establish the Bunhill Press for Theodore Besterman, the Voltaire scholar. He also designed for the publishers, Faber and Faber.

He met Faber's reader, T. S. Eliot, and Eliot's secretary, Anne Bradby. In 1938 he married Anne. They would have four children - Benedict, Colin, Jane, and Kate. Anne Ridler became well known as a poet.

During the Second World War Ridler served in the British Royal Air Force, in Orkney, Nigeria, and Germany.

After the war he resumed free-lance designing, and also became the first tutor in typography at the Royal College of Art in London and typographer to Lund Humphries & Co. in Bradford.

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