Walter Tracy

Walter Valentine Tracy RDI (14 February 1914 – 28 April 1995) was an English type designer, typographer and writer.

Biography Walter Tracy was born in Islington, London and attended Shoreditch Secondary school. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to the large printing firm William Clowes as a compositor. When he had completed his apprenticeship, Tracy went to work in the typographic studio of The Baynard Press, a printing house. From 1938 to 1946, Tracy had been rejected by the army's medical examination, he worked in an advertising agency as a print buyer.

From 1947 Tracy began to work part-time for the British Linotype & Machinery Ltd. (L&M) company, a subsidiary of Mergenthaler Linotype. The following year he was hired as a full-time employee by L&M, where he was going to spend the following 30 years.

From the mid-1950s Tracy was also responsible for a range of influential Arabic type developments, among them the making of the Mrowa-Linotype Simplified Arabic type in collaboration with Kamel Mrowa and Nabih Jaroudi.