John Morgan’s posthumously published Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses is a moving assessment of what makes the designer tick
‘Even if inconsequential to most, I have spent a large part of my life and practice focusing on small concerns, the almost invisible and the qualities such preoccupations can bring to a project,’ writes the visionary typographer and graphic designer John Morgan towards the end of this book. He designed the templates for the magazine you’re reading (unless you’re reading this online, in which case you’re looking at an interpretation of that design), and in this posthumously published book he selects 31 books that have acted as ‘muses’ for his work in general. Each of them has been photographed as covers and selected spreads; each is accompanied by a short explanation of why they’re there. These muses range from catalogues (R.B. Kitaj, Sandra [Two]; 1996) on which John worked when starting out in his career and from which he learned about how to do things with images, to magazines (editions of Paris Vogue guestedited by Roman Polanski and Marlene Dietrich in 1976 and 73 respectively) in regard to which John marvels at photographer Guy Bourdin’s respect for the magazine’s gutter (the bit where one page meets another and some information in an image spread across two pages is lost). As well as the standardised, restrained formats of paperback series by Gallimard and Les Éditions de Minuit and whose influence was so much a part of John’s work. Sometimes the actual content of the muse is as relevant as its form; sometimes it’s not. And sometimes it’s about the simple pleasure of a woodgrain effect. But often it’s not about the books at all and more about the personal and biographical details that texture John’s words like another type of grain. In this fascinating, illuminating and moving assessment of what made one man tick, it’s John that’s in the details.
Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses by John Morgan Ten. Thousand Angels Press, £35 (softcover)
From the March 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
