THE book designer Ian Mackenzie-Kerr spent nearly 50 years with the art books publisher Thames & Hudson. As well as a tremendous visual sense and an understanding of the disciplines of design and printing, he brought to the firm a wide knowledge of art and architecture, and the gift of inquisitiveness.
Ian Mackenzie-Kerr was born in London, the son of a hotel manager and a ballroom dance teacher. He was educated at Bryanston. Playing Lady Macbeth in a school production fuelled his love of acting, and later he played the lead in The Recruiting Officer and was offered (but declined) the Peter Cook role in the Australian tour of Beyond the Fringe.
After his National Service, partly spent in Cyprus, monitoring Arabic broadcasts, he studied art at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art, where he edited Ark magazine and learnt to imitate the styles of his two illustration tutors, Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden. In 1951 he contributed to a café mural at the Festival of Britain. In 1957 he joined Thames & Hudson; it was a family concern, and it quickly became Mackenzie-Kerr’s family circle too.
He became friendly with the photographer Edwin Smith and his wife, the writer Olive Cook, when they worked on books such as English Abbeys and Priories (1960) and The English Garden (1964). Cook and Mackenzie-Kerr collaborated again on English Cottages and Farmhouses (1982) and Edwin Smith: Photographs 1935-1971 (1984).
Another photographic book by a husband-and-wife team was Castles of Britain by Bamber Gascoigne, with plates by his wife Christina. When Gascoigne wrote his Guide to Manual and Mechanical Print Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet — How to Identify Prints (1988), he praised Mackenzie-Kerr’s patience and skill in designing the book.
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Hundreds of books and jackets came from his hands. Perhaps most important, he created the identity for the Great Civilizations series, always drawing the spine and title-page lettering. Beginning with The Dawn of Civilization (1961), this series eventually took the story through The Dark Ages, The Renaissance and on to The Twentieth Century.
In 1969 Mackenzie-Kerr also designed the handsome, slipcased format for the Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures, the first of which was given by his friend Nikolaus Pevsner. In the same year he drew the cover for the British Council catalogue at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Mackenzie-Kerr was active in the architecturally based Victorian and Twentieth Century societies; he was designer and joint editor of the Victorian Society Annual, and enjoyed foreign tours with groups of friends. In 1981 he was elected to the Double Crown Club — the book designers’ top table — and he served on its committee in 1993-94. With unseemly modesty, his one address to the club, in 1995, was entitled A Book to Fit a Coffee Table.
He had recently designed Kenneth Baker’s George IV: A Life in Caricature. He died shortly before the party to celebrate another book of photographs by Edwin Smith, the Whittington Press’s A View of the Cotswolds, to which he had contributed a memoir.
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Ian Mackenzie-Kerr, book designer, was born on November 18, 1929. He died on May 27, 2005, aged 75.