International TypoGraphics Magazine

At the end of his foreword to Christopher Burke’s Active literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography , Robin Kinross asserts that the time for serious discussion about Jan Tschichold has arrived, now that much of his work and its supporting documents are publicly accessible, and as the passing years lengthen into a more critical perspective. New efforts to delineate Tschichold’s signal contribution to twentieth-century typographic design should, Kinross proposes, begin at precisely this primary evidence and with efforts to explain more fully the contexts Tschichold inhabited. The narrative of Active literature, thus anticipated, delivers on much of this programme.

The proportions of Burke’s narrative are a good guide to its make-up. The majority of its 336 pages is divided between two sections of roughly 100 pages each. The first, ‘Making history’, covers the period of Tschichold’s fervent commitment to New Typography (1925–32); the second details ‘Script, type and book’ projects undertaken from the mid-1920s until the later 1930s. A third section, ‘Exile’, deals more briskly with book work in Switzerland, Tschichold’s pre- and post-war connections with Britain, and with the now iconic typographic realignment he underwent at this time. Interleaved are abbreviated treatments of the young Tschichold (‘From Johannes to Ivan’); his traumatic year of transition, 1933 (‘Seizure’); and retrospective themes of a life (‘Epilogue’). Welcome extras are supplied, including four of Tschichold&lrquo;s key texts rendered in English. The result is a ‘professional biography’ (Burke’s characterisation), but not a complete one, as it mostly leaves aside Tschichold’s ‘settled&lrquo; post-war Swiss years and work in Britain at Penguin Books. The latter has, for better or worse, been dealt with elsewhere by others and is here acknowledged only to demonstrate the extent to which earlier modes of designing were abandoned. Burke is unabashed in finding the slackened tension of Tschichold’s later career far less interesting than the ‘revolutionary zeal and conflict’ of the Weimar Republic period or the uncertainties of early exile. Interwar central Europe is, for Burke, the ‘crucible’ of twentieth-century modernity and, by extension, the years of Tschichold’s greatest relevance.

The advances of Active literature are not of a major kind – difficult when the contours of Tschichold’s career are already well mapped. Rather, it is the cumulative filling out and rediscovery of numerous elements of his work that enliven our understanding of it; here Burke’s time in the archives has paid dividends. A few highlights, among many: Tschichold’s first manifesto of New Typography published in the socialist review Kulturschau and pre-dating by several months the famous Elementare Typographie (1925); design and production details of poster work for Phoebus-Palast; clarification of Tschichold’s connections with Otto Neurath and the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna; his interest in stencil letters and type-faces; the expanse of books designed for the Büchergilde Gutenberg and Bücherkreis; and his involvement in Uhertype, the early and ultimately unsuccessful photocomposition system of the 1930s.

Documenting all this is a procession of images, apparently some 700 in total. They work relentlessly to convey the physicality of artefacts. Spreads of books show bulk, as do spine and top-edge views. Sketches, drawings, paste-ups and proofs track thinking, error and revision. Folds, creases, rips, rubbing and stains are intact and unretouched. Artefacts are generally cut out along their contours rather than cropped to a rectangular frame or irrelevant keyline. Captions nearly always give dimensions and ‘actual size’ images are sometimes supplied. Smaller ‘galleries’ of covers and spreads, spanning one or several pages, pull back to reveal patterns in series and habits of layout and treatment…

by Eric Kindel