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appointment and he soon was unemployed. His design portfolio at the time, he remembers,“was an omnium gatherum; an Irish bouillabaisse heavy on saffron, light on garlic.” It was then that he applied for the job of staff designer—the first such position— at the University of Nebraska Press, where he still works. Eckersley, his Swedish-born wife, Dika, and their three children moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1981, where Dika also became a book designer at the same press. In the past quarter of a century, he has designed dozens of volumes for Nebraska and other academic presses. Throughout that period, he has also been active in the Association of American University Presses and other organizations; has taught as a visiting lecturer at prominent schools in both the United Kingdom and the United States; and has had his work selected for the design profession’s most prestigious competitions. Among his various book awards is a silver medal from the Leipzig Book Fair and the Carl Herzog Book Design Award. Perhaps the most gratifying of his honors was his designation several years ago as a Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts, an award that his father had also received in 1963, making them the only father-son duo to achieve that distinction. That same year, in 1999, when Warren Chappel’s A Short History of the Printed Word was revised and enlarged by Robert Bringhurst, it included two of Eckersley’s books as distinctive examples of current design. In addition, his work was featured in Typography Now by Rick Poyner, Design Writing Research by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, On Book Design by Richard Hendel, Emigre, Eye, and other periodicals. Eckersley’s lifestyle is a lot like his layouts: structured and restrained, but enlivened by interesting detours.When I last visited him, he was deeply involved in the painstaking work of laying out a new book by Avital Ronell, titled Stupidity, promoted as a scholarly work on “ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason.” Committed first and foremost to the challenge of designing, Eckersley seems wholly oblivious to the prospect of awards or fame: “The prize of recognition for a book designer,” he wrote in a recent essay, “is to be allowed to design more books.”