I have a personal recollection of the St Bride Library from many years ago, when it was a public library with a specialist collection, and was very convenient for the school I went to, which at the time was on the Embankment at Blackfriars. My old school has moved, and the Library has reverted to being a specialist institution, and has been extensively refurbished.

Located adjacent to one of Sir Christopher Wren’s finest churches, itself built in the ruins of older places of worship going back to Saxon times, and just a few yards from Fleet Street, once the home of Britain’s newspaper industry, the St Bride Foundation hosts the St Bride Printing Library, one of the most significant collections of typography and historical printed reference in the world.

I was delighted to return to the St Bride Library last week, for an illustrated talk by three researchers from the University of Reading’s Department of Typography and Graphic Design, to accompany an exhibition of early printed material from the 19th century. Paul Stiff, Paul Dobraszczyk, and Mike Esbester have put together a fascinating exhibition examining the pre-history of information design. Their collection of 19th century and earlier printed ephemera illustrates brilliantly the problem that information design tries to answer: how can we make information easy to understand, and to act upon?

Unlike literature, which people read for pleasure or education, people read information products so that they can make informed decisions for action: which train goes from Reading to London without stopping? which plough is best for clay soils? or how can I notify the tax authorities about the change in my circumstances? The printed artefacts in the exhibition come principally from three areas of human activity: time and travel, including railway timetables, annotated maps, and distance tables for calculating cab fares; questions and answers, including early forms from the tax man and from insurance companies, and pre-printed licenses and birth certificates, where only the details need to be filled in by hand; and selling and buying, including catalogues for everything from underwear and sedan chairs to farm machinery and seeds and bulbs.

In his talk, Paul Stiff commented that the research project had some similarities to the current practice of constructing a persona to represent an unknown audience, and then writing and designing to satisfy the persona’s needs; except that in this project they were working in the reverse direction, taking the printed materials and working backwards to postulate the sort of audience they were intended to serve. The explosion in print in the 19th century complemented the immense growth of industrial production, as celebrated by the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the source of many of the catalogues on display), and the sudden availability of the railway as a means of inter-city and intra-urban travel (the Metropolitan Line, the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863). Most of the material produced in this period probably did not survive. Handbills and posters in particular had a built-in obsolescence: no-one wants to know the time and location of last week’s circus performance.

Stiff, Dobraszczyk, and Esbester have given us a glimpse of the what one aspect of the 19th century city street looked like, and it is remarkably similar to our own everyday experience. The difference is that while pragmatic decisions about design were taken by printers and publishers in an ad hoc fashion in the past, today we have specialist professionals, who study their audiences, and the situation of information display, in order to design information materials that can effectively support action. People today have similar needs to those of our Victorian forbears, just some of the details have changed. We probably want to buy a mobile phone or a music player rather than a sedan chair or a dozen wing collars, but we’re still looking for the right train, and trying to fill in the tax form correctly. Let’s hope that as information and document designers we are more successful at delivering information than our Victorian predecessors were.

The exhibition, Designing information before designers: Print for everyday life in the 19th century, is at the St Bride Library, near Ludgate Circus in London, until 29th January 2010, and will be at the University of Reading in February and March 2010.