David Guy Barnabas Kindersley was born at Codicote, Hertfordshire on 11 June 1915. He was the son of Major Guy Molesworth Kindersley (a stockbroker and MP) and was the grandson on his mother’s side of the Arts and Crafts potter Sir Edmund Elton. He was educated at St Cyprian’s School, Eastbourne, where he became head boy. He went on to Marlborough College, but was withdrawn after three years because of rheumatoid arthritis. After recovery, Kindersley was sent to Paris to learn French and study sculpture. He read the works of Eric Gill, and decided to become a stone-cutter. He initially worked with the brothers Udini in Fulham, who ran a traditional ‘trade’ carving business. Kindersley became an apprentice to Gill at Pigotts, High Wycombe in 1934. He then worked on a number of important commissions, including Bentall’s store in Kingston upon Thames, St John’s College, Oxford and Dorset House. As early as 1936 Kindersley’s lettering was described as ‘perfect’ in a review of a London exhibition ‘Eric Gill and Companions’. Having bloomed as a prolific lettercutter, Kindersley departed Gill’s workshop in 1936 to set up on his own, by the River Arun. He left Pigotts frustrated by the Catholicism, but excited by community living and what it could bring to one’s work. He married his first wife, Christine, at the beginning of the Second World War and ran a tiny pub ‘The Smith’s Arms’. Kindersley’s children from his first marriage included Peter Kindersley, who would co-found the publishing company Dorling-Kindersley. Kindersley registered as a Conscientious Objector, applied for, and was rejected by the Home Guard. Upon the death of Gill in 1940, Kindersley sorted out the affairs of his workshop at Pigotts. In 1945 Kindersley moved to Cambridgeshire and set up a letter-cutting workshop at Dales Barn in the village of Barton. He took on apprentices and assistants and was regarded as a ‘natural teacher’. At that time, he also commenced teaching calligraphy at Cambridge Art School, having initially gone to enroll for the course. Gill’s influence would remain strong. He would later recall that his ‘views on almost any subject were always reasoned if not reasonable, and they influenced me for life’. Kindersley was preoccupied in the 1950s and 1960s by the survival of the workshop culture in a post-war climate of industrial expansion. His proximity to Cambridge University Press meant that his skills were recommended to many Cambridge colleges. His work from the late 1940s, mostly college memorial plaques and war memorials, caught the public eye. He cared passionately about public recognition of good design in Britain. In the 1950s he pioneered the Designer Craftsman Society and Shop in Cambridge. He was also involved with the Council of Industrial Design and the Craft Centre of Great Britain from their evolution in the late 1940s; he succeeded John Farleigh as the centre’s president briefly in the early 1960s, but stepped down because of concerns about underfunding. In 1952 Kindersley submitted a design, MoT Serif, to the Ministry of Transport, which sought new lettering for use on UK road signs. He invented an optical spacing machine which could recreate the position of lettering on signs and in print that was most satisfying to the eye. Although the Road Research Laboratory found his design more legible, the all-capitals design with serifs was passed over in favour of that of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Many English street signs, especially in Cambridge use Kindersley fonts. In 1967 Kindersley moved his workshop to the 14th century Chesterton Tower in Cambridge and then, ten years later, to the converted infants’ school in Victoria Road, the premises the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop still occupies. Kindersley was not religious, but had a strongly contemplative side. He had an essentially spiritual view of the workshop and his ideas of wholeness as the integration of home and work was a development of Gill’s ‘cell of good living in the chaos of our world.’ He produced bookplates, book jackets, paper-weights and film titles; he worked as adviser to the Shell Film Unit from 1949 to 1958 and was a consultant to Letraset International from 1964 until 1988. His first marriage was dissolved in 1957. In 1986 he married the letter-cutter Lida Lopes Cardozo. They worked together on many commissions and produced three sons. David Kindersley died at Cambridge on 2 February 1995.