the market place | NEWS OF THE MICROFILM INDUSTRY
EARLY SUMMER 1994 No 38
A sa d lo ss to th e M icrofilm Industry. P aul M onam y J a m es 1932 - 1994:
Designs which flowed from Paul James included the Caps Project One multi-purpose readers (maybe the first large format reader which, by virtue of James’ grasp of aesthetic design, looked right in a modern office or drawing office), the Mercury motorised 16mm reader, the ingenious 012 Microfilm Cassette and the Project Three electrostatic reader printers. Designs from Paul James for the Imtec marque included the 014 reader printer, the 016 Retrieval Printer which could operate under computer control, the particularly handsome 2000 range of reader printers, the 2001 Universal reader (a successor to the Caps Project One) and the RNA3 Reader Printer which served on board Royal Navy ships, where the motion of a small ship in a big sea makes heavy demands on equipment originally intended for office use.
Paul James, who tragically died after a short illness on 16th January was something of a rarity in Britain - a designer of fine aesthetic sense who found an outlet for his talents in industry. The field was advanced micro film equipment. He achieved an international reputa tion for designing innovative models characterised by their aesthetic appeal and practicality over a period which ended only in the closing months of 1993.
James-designed products could prove remarkably long lasting - PJ200 reader printers delivered to the Dept, of Health and Social Security in the early 1970s, only went out of use in late 1993.
His entry to this career was fortuitous. After reading mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge his interest in printing techniques and the graphic arts led to a number of opportunities with printing/publishing com panies including the Kynoch Press, ICI (1956) and Eyre and Spottiswoode (1958-1962). He then joined the graphic design company of Ernst Hoch. After a summer vacation he arrived back to find that Gerald Frankel of Caps Printing in Soho had persuaded Ernst Hoch and his group to join Caps in 1962. When this unusually quiet and thoughtful young graph ic designer saw that Caps had started to design products for the office his curiosity got the better of him, and in his spare time he designed the first ever analogue com puter to help typographers in their work. Immediate encouragement was given to Paul to convert his outline design into a working product. Then he was persuaded that he could train himself to be a full time design engi neer. This decision was quite literally to change the look of the microfilm industry.The many products he designed, different in appearance from anything that had gone before, influenced other designers and found their way into major UK installations such as the Social Security Administration and the Business Registry. The Micrographics Market Place
The realisation of Paul James’ last design will be posthumous: Until November he was working on a radi cal new scanner/recorder for drawings - a device capable of capturing both a computer processable digital image and a microfilm copy of drawings up to the large AO size. This product - the James Camera, as it will now be called - maintains the Imtec tradition of being first in the field with new products. The James camera appeared for the first time at the recent Hannover Fair. If the success achieved by earlier Paul James designs is repeated, it will be in use well into the twenty first cen tury. Paul James’s abilities were officially recognised in 1980 when he received the Duke of Edinburgh Design award for his work on the Imtec 2000. Paul James was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Gerald Frankel comments that “For all his seriousness Paul’s sense of fun was always there hovering behind his eyes and he had a sense of style that made life better for all of us who knew him”. Still a youthful figure in his early sixties Paul James and his wife Catherine must have had every expectation that a creative and fulfilling career would be followed by increasing periods away from the pressure of London at the family cottage in France. It is a tragedy by any standard that these expectations were not to be fulfilled. Catherine James and sons Conrad and Oliver deserve all our sympathy in their sad loss.