Vivian Ridler

Vivian Hughes Ridler, CBE (2 October 1913 – 11 January 2009), was a British printer, typographer and scholar.

In the late 1930s, Ridler moved from Oxford to London, to establish the Bunhill Press for Theodore Besterman, the Voltaire scholar.

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.

Among Ridler's productions were Stanley Morison's book on the Fell types, facsimiles of Eliot's The Waste Land and the Constable Sketchbooks and The Great Tournament Roll for the British College of Arms.

After his retirement, Ridler ran his own printing shop, where he produced on his hand-press Christmas cards (often incorporating poems by Anne Ridler), broadsides, ephemera, and some small books under the revived imprint of the Perpetua Press; one was Mutiny on the Bembo, a set of comic verse lampooning publishing by his colleague OUP editor John Bell.