Born in 1904, the eldest son of Edward Thompson Clifton Firth, a manufacturer and inventor, and his wife, Blanch Emily Banks.

Contemporary Bill Haythornthwaite recalls: "we used to pick up the original Bauhaus material coming out of Germany from the [Elam Art School] library before Hitler wrecked it (sic)".

All ornamentation and superfluous elements stripped out, Firth used the varying weight and density of the type in his compositions in order to draw attention and add emphasis.

This may seem common today, but in the context of the day, where the standard approach towards typography in advertisement was to get the most 'bang for the buck'; stripping out elements and adding emphasis through type variation was a highly novel and ‘modern’ concept.

[2] On his retirement in 1974, Firth gave much of his surviving work to Auckland Libraries, including many display prints as well as more than 100,000 photographic negatives.