Robert Harling (typographer)

Robert Henry Harling (London 27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008 Godstone, Surrey) was a British typographer, designer, journalist and novelist who lived to the age of 98.

Robert Harling's success came despite an unpromising upbringing. He was born in Highbury, London, in 1910, and was orphaned at an early age being brought up by his mother's friend, a nurse whom he regarded as an aunt. After her marriage they moved to Brighton, bringing him in contact with the Royal Pavilion, and a lifelong appreciation for architecture and design, and the Sea, where he learnt to swim and sail. With the death of his uncle he returned to Islington with his aunt, and was enrolled in Owen's School. This was the story he put about. "Later research showed this was complete invention. He grew up and went to school in Islington, with a living mother and a father who drove a London taxi. He had a brother and a first wife who, like his parents, had been ruthlessly excised by Harling from his biography, and came as a revelation to his middle-aged children."

He attributed his interest in lettering from his study of Pears' Cyclopaedia, which he was given on his 12th birthday. He was fascinated by the reproductions of assay marks for plate, fine examples of English vernacular lettering. His "uncle" would enlarged them for him photographically so he could laboriously copy them. This love of letter-forms and contemporary gothic led him to the Central School of Arts and Crafts, having rejected a place at Oxford.

He briefly kept a bookshop in Lamb's Conduit Street, and then got a job as a trainee at the Daily Mail, but as he would tell friends later "left, quite untrained, a year later". Two six-month stints followed at two of the best printers in the country, Lund Humphries at Bradford (for whom he mounted an exhibition on Rudolf Koch in 1935) and the Kynoch Press at Birmingham, "trying – not all that successfully – to learn more about the technical side of printing". This led him to write and publish two books prior to the war: The London Miscellany (1937) and Home: a vignette (1938). Both drew on his love of 19th-century architecture and design.

In 1939 Robert Harling met Ian Fleming, the meeting was (as Harling found later) no accident. Fleming, was serving in Naval Intelligence, and had heard about Harling's editorship of the Typography journal, which was setting new standards for the design and display of printed matter. During their meeting he learned that Harling was also writer and designer of "News-Reel Maps" for the News Chronicle, and "demi-semi-resident art director" of Lord Delamere's up-and-coming advertising agency. This led him to commission Harling to redesign the Admiralty's weekly intelligence report, but they were not to meet again until 1941.

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