He was born in 1889 in England . His profession of choice was typography and typeface design. His role in development and promotion of typography and lettering was great.

He left school at the age of 14 so that he could work. During the First World War, he refused to serve in the military and thus was in prison from 1914 to 1918. Allegedly, he refused to serve due to religious beliefs.

Through the interest in richly designed Jesuit books, he became interested in printing. Beatrice occasionally describes him as a man of strict and ascetic appearance.

The Times newspaper had one addition related to printing which Stanley got in 1912. The addition included many technical data, articles and job advertisements. His first job was with the Imprint magazine.

From 1919 he worked for Pelican Press printing office and then from 1921 for Cloister Press printing office in Manchester .

While he cooperated with Cambridge University Press printing office, in 1923 he became one of the founders and editors of the Fleuron magazine. It was a magazine of high quality, both printing and published texts quality wise. That is when he also became an advisor in Monotype where he stayed until his death.

He also worked as the editor of the Penrose annual magazine dedicated to graphics.

In 1923 he started to work on books shaping.

After many public critiques of the Times newspaper related to both printing quality and the look itself, he became their typographic consultant in 1929, and on October the 3rd 1932, the newspaper was for the first time laid out in his typeface named the Times New Roman. Stanley remained the best known for this typeface (although he brought back many forgotten typefaces into the Monotype drawers and introduced many new, modern ones, thus bringing them to the wide usage through Monotype's library). Before his arrival to Monotype and the introducing of a few new typefaces to the market, the English printing tradition mostly and only used Plantin and Caslon.

Namely, Stanley did not project the letters, so the drawings for the Times New Roman were done by Victor Lardent who worked with the newspaper at that time. As the exemplar for the new font, Stanley brought him the typeface used in Antwerp in 16th century in the Christopher Plantin workshop, although there are notes that the exemplar for this font was the Gros Cicero by Robert Granjon cut in Paris in 1569. The typeface soon became very popular and was one of the first digitalized typefaces when the computers emerged in the mid 80s. Today, it is almost impossible for anyone to type anything on a computer and without seeing the Times New Roman. But this is a different interesting story – on how it came to this and on history of this typeface.

From 1935 to 1951 Morison published History of the Times, in four parts. After the war ended in 1945, he became the editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

He published many typographical books and wrote for many magazines. His best known essay is “First Principles of Typography”.

The famous typefaces he had chosen and initiated their adaptation for machine typeset (also included in Monotype's collection) were Bembo and Blado.

translation into English: Danijela Tomazović