1996 John G. Dreyfus

Born in London in 1918 and deceased in 2002, John Gustav Dreyfus learned classical typography at the Cambridge University Press. From 1946 to 1959 he worked there as Assistant University Printer and participated in the design of the catalog for the Gutenberg anniversary exhibition 1963 with the title "Printing and the Mind of Man".
From 1954 he was a typographical consultant for the Monotype Corporation as well as for the whole European territory of the Limited Editions Club in New York. From 1967 to 1973 he was president of the Association Typographique Internationale (A.TYP.I, then honorary president) and in 1975 he was elected president of the Printing Historical Society in London. Through his numerous publications on historical and current topics Dreyfus has worked on the development from metal type to phototype and to digital reproduction of characters. In 1996, Dreyfus received the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society. In his laudatory speech, Hermann Zapf described him as a man who "is not only very closely connected with Gutenberg, but also with the changes of his art in our time."