The Brussels of Laure Malcl�s-Masereel
On Friday I took a magical mystery tour of London by Routemaster bus, conducted by typographers Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon, whose knowledge of London's public lettering is unparalleled. Along the way we scorned the "mean serifs" of the inscription on the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, admired the fantastic Victorian storefront of James Smith & Sons (Umbrellas) Ltd in New Oxford Street, and learned that the windows spelling out OXO on the iconic Oxo Tower were a cunning way of bypassing a ban on advertising on the riverfront. This enchanting experience would have prompted me to post on the shopfronts of London and Paris in the parallel art of Eric Ravilious and Lucien Boucher, but I've already done that here . So instead I shall leap from the Oxo Tower in London to the Martini Tower in Brussels, as seen by the artist Laure Malcl�s-Masereel. This modernist masterpiece with its distinctly 1960s sanserif lettering was pulled down in 2001-2002, the