I am very sorry to hear of Mr. McLean’s passing.
We worked together during his translation of Jost Hochuli’s Detail in typography from the original German, which Agfa-Compugraphic published around 1986-87.

I knew him as a kind and gentle man who loved type.

I never met him, but I have a couple of his books, on Jan Tschicold, which are nicely done.

Ruari McLean was layout artist and typographer for the boy’s comic “Eagle”, which I subscribed to as a young lad of 7 or 8 (late 1950s). As well as strips, the Eagle had typeset stories etc.

Ruari McLean to Marcus Morris (founding editor, 1950): ’I was on the payroll at £5 a week, as your typographic adviser. During the day I was working in Holden’s advertising agency for George Rainbird and I could only see you in the evenings. Shortly you asked me to find a flat that we could share during the week; my wife and family were in Essex, yours at Birkdale, so this sounded sensible. I found a flat in South Audley Street. You were unperturbed when we discovered that most of the other occupants of the building were tarts. It was the main activity in South Audley Street; doors banged and cars drove away at periodic intervals all through the night until breakfast time. Many evenings I was present in the flat when you briefed the artists who had been invited to work on this new project. Nearly always they had not done what you had asked them to do, but what they thought was really wanted. If, as quite frequently happened, they refused to be told how to draw their strips by a young parson who had never edited anything except a parish magazine before, and persisted in doing it how they wanted, they found themselves dropped.

’Often we were still at it at two or three or even four in the morning, at which time I was ready to agree with anything; but you never let anything go until you were completely satisfied, and would consult me about a comma or a hyphen, and argue about it endlessly, and curse me for being lazy if I said it didn’t matter, and could I please go to bed? In retrospect, it seems to me that every word and every syllable in the early numbers of Eagle were chewed over endlessly, until you were certain it was right.’

I was lucky to find a copy of his Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography when I got my first freelance book project a few years ago — I learned quite a bit from this manual!

McLean not only wrote about Tschichold, he also translated at least two of his books into English — Aymmetric Typography and The New Typography (this last has a great introduction by Robin Kinross, I might add).

Right, Asymmetric Typography was first published in English in Canada by McLelland & Stewart in 1969, and my wife had a copy when she was at art school in Winnipeg in 1970, which I was lucky enough to read shortly after. A big influence.

Also received the Distinguished Service Cross and Croix de Guerre for his work in Free French submarines and coastal reconnaissance. Typographers on Type is a good read for dipping into on top of the other books mentioned here so far.
Tim

A very informative Obit in Guardian for Ruari McLean as noted by Michael Rowley on the Desktop Publishing Forum.