The graphic type case on our cover wraps around a wide variety of sorts in this issue, objects and subjects both typographic and human. Appropriately the futurists provide our starting point, then Paul Attong’s elegant (and therapeutic) copperplate letters allow an early pause for calligraphic contemplation.
Philip Thompson chronicles the work, from just one year, of master typographic designer Derek Birdsall, while Arno Stolz’s collection of type case imagery bears equally detailed examination.
The Czech modernists of the 20s and 30s envisioned a society where art would be accessible to everyone, an ambition shared by Michael Caine, as he prints with fine types, on fine papers, in his Paris studio.
In this number, also our move to Frutiger’s redesigned Linotype Univers system (more about it in one of our next issues) as our new house style.
Type artefacts, practitioners and typographic ambitions, gathered together for summer reading, to be enjoyed, perhaps in that typographic deck chair.
Hans Dieter Reichert & Mike Daines
With the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the First World War, the new state of Czechoslovakia emerged as a democratic and independent republic. A new nation – what better stimulus could there be for modernist reform of culture and the arts? The years between the two world wars were a prosperous period for the modern movement in the former Czechoslovakia (now split once more). A young generation of artists and intellectuals sought to place the country among the principal centres of the avant-garde. Prague in particular, situated right at the heart of Europe, with its doors now wide open to the world, became a melting pot for new ideas, assimilating influences from East and the West. Czech modernism of the 1920s and 30s displays a fruitful synthesis of tendencies from France and Germany on the one hand, and Russia on the other…
Dr. Christopher Burke &
Dr. Patricia Córdoba
Baseline 20–25 included a lexicon of typographic designers, companies and terms. Now issues 26–30 contain an A–Z of selected typeface designers, covered in more detail than was possible in the lexicon. Each ‘potted’ biography contains a reference to the original Baseline article abut the designer, from which the condensed version has been taken.
In this issue we cover G–M…
Editorial team
©1999 Bradbourne Publishing Ltd.