Obituary: Richard Eckersley

Richard Eckersley, who has died aged 65, was an award-winning book designer whose work on scholarly books set an industry standard. His classical approach to typography and design was enhanced by his understated wit. Who knew that copyright pages could be so entertaining? "[That] page has become something of a hobby horse for me," he wrote in 1998. "The Library of Congress's preferred layout for the CIP data is quite irresponsible, a blemish ... it could certainly be reformatted to satisfy both the librarian and the typographically sensitive reader."

Born in Lancashire, he was the son of Tom Eckersley, one of Britain's most recognisable poster artists and educators, while his mother Daisy introduced him to London music-hall matinees. His brothers, Paul and Anthony, also became graphic designers. He attended University College school, Hampstead, and read English and Italian at Trinity College, Dublin, where he had aspirations to be a writer. His first foray into design was for the student literary magazine Icarus, and he was soon designing for college events.

From 1962 to 1966, he studied for an art and design diploma at the London College of Printing (LCP), where his father was head of graphic design. It was on this course that Richard met his future wife, Dika, who also became a book designer; they married at its end.

His early interests in literature and design shaped Eckersley's career. He learned to appreciate "the great books of the past", as he called them, including those of Aldus Manutius, the Venetian publisher of Virgil and Erasmus, but also the "readable and affordable" editions brought out by Penguin in Britain and Knopf and Houghton Mifflin in the United States. The relationship between the "well-made and the well-written" influenced his direction as a designer, and his interest in typographic accessibility also led him later to co-author, with Charles Ellertson, Richard Angstadt and Richard Hendel, The Glossary of Typesetting Terms (1994).

After his graduation, Eckersley joined the London firm of Lund Humphries as a junior designer, working on books and catalogues. He also freelanced, gaining experience in producing museum catalogues for the Arts Council, including Rodin (1970), and briefly taught graphic design and typography at the LCP. In 1971, he enjoyed a four-month exchange between the LCP and the University of Massachusetts Press with fellow book designer Rich Hendel. As Hendel remembered, "I returned to find a body of work that looked nothing like scholarly books had ever looked: bold [book] covers done even in those primitive pre-Mac times, interior designs that showed such intelligence."

Richard and Dika moved to Bath, and eventually to Ireland, where he became senior graphic designer at the Kilkenny Design Workshops (1974-80). A year later he took a post teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania. He would continue to teach throughout his career, conducting workshops, one-to-one critiques and occasionally lecturing.

From 1981, as senior designer for the University of Nebraska Press, he was responsible for the design of some 400-500 books, including some of the most typographically intelligent scholarly works of the time. Among them were Jacques Derrida's Glas (1986) and John P Leavey Jr's companion volume Glassary (1986), as well as Cinders (1991), Warren Motte's Questioning Edmond Jabès (1990), Willa Cather's My Antonia (1995), Eric Chevillard's On the Ceiling (2000) and Kevin J Hayes' An American Cycling Odyssey 1887 (2002).

Eckersley's reputation moved into the public's consciousness in 1989 with the design of such works as Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Michael Jensen typeset the book, yet for such a complex undertaking the process between designer and compositor was completely interlinked. Each page was a performance, where graphic marks and gaps (such as the deliberate creation of "rivers" of irregular spaced words) and ways of framing the text, all questioned conventional page layout. Typography of contrasting size and typefaces became the vehicle to express different voices and modes of writing. It was a radical approach toward visual experimentation in layout and typographic treatment of the texts, and is today recognised as a classic.

Despite his intention of staying in the US for only a few years, Eckersley remained at the University of Nebraska Press throughout - they gave him a flexibility rare among university publishers and he won numerous awards, including the Carl Herzog prize for book design in 1994 and the American Institute of Graphic Arts' Fifty Covers/Fifty Books competition (1999, 2001, 2003). He was a frequent recipient of accolades from the Association of American University Presses, and his work appeared in various collections, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.

Last year, examples of his and Dika's book covers were part of Making History, an exhibition at the London College of Communication (formerly the LCP) celebrating the work of past staff and students. In 1999, he was made a Royal Designer for Industry, as his father had been in 1963.

When Eckersley was not designing books he was reading them. Dika said that he "set himself the task of reading every book by a particular author, all Evelyn Waugh, all Dickens, all Flaubert, all Balzac." His other outlet was as an amateur jazz saxophonist. Dika survives him, as does his son Sam (also a graphic designer) and daughters Nell and Camilla.

· Richard Hilton Eckersley, book designer, born February 20 1941; died April 17 2006