Foucault at Minnesota

Jacket spread and title page spread of a new book (or more accurately, one never translated into English before) by Michel Foucault (1926-1984) from University of Minnesota Press. The title of this English version is Speech Begins after Death. The text is from a series of interviews Foucault gave in 1968, when his fame was a fresh phenomenon and he was not yet widely recognized as "the most influential thinker of the late twentieth century." I want to read the book, when the library copy is ready, but in the meantime am admiring the design, bold in a way Foucault would have approved. The two things I like best are – 1). the red overlay rising up the front cover like a flood-tide (drowning the figure of the author at his study table), and 2). the way everything on the title page runs into a rectangle justified on both sides (equivalent in dimensions to author photo) eschewing the hierarchical typography  that characterizes every other title page I can think of, traditional or contemporary. It seems to me that the innovative spirit underpinning these designs also signals the difference between non-profit and for-profit publishing. No commercial publisher would be likely to confound the reader's expectations – 1). that any cover-image will be easily legible rather than subtly symbolic, and 2). that a title page will readily instruct the eye about the relative importance of the units that compose it.

Re-Marketing

Manhattan gallery Andrew Roth recently presented a solo show by Ricardo Valentim (born 1978 in Portugal) called The New Typography. "He is," according to the press release, "best known for his film screenings and lecture pieces, but works across a variety of media, including radio, printed matter, photography, and sculpture."

This project seems to have been intended as a tribute to Jan Tschichold (1902-1978), universally recognized as one of the most alluring and influential type and graphic designers of the 20th century. As a longtime fan I have featured Tschichold's work often (here and here and here at greatest length). His most famous book (or manifesto, originally published in 1928 and still in print) was called The New Typography, as was the 2010 exhibition devoted to him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Andrew Roth's press release attempted as follows to explain the connection between The New Typography by Tschichold and The New Typography by Valentim:

"From the turn of the century until the seventies, type foundries designed and distributed typefaces through what were known as type specimens, documents showcasing letterpress type to designers and printers. For over a year, Valentim has been collecting these type specimens. His interest lies in the ways in which they reveal structures of representation and communication. While typefaces usually function as vehicles to present ideas and content, in the case of type specimens this form is inverted: the ideas and content (i.e. words and texts) are used as vehicles to present typefaces."

In plain English, Valentim bought genuine Tschichold type specimen sheets (necessarily from dealers who specialize in typographic ephemera), slapped them into Plexiglas mounts, and then proposed to resell them on the art market as his own conceptual appropriations. The profit would surely be colossal, considering that the overall contemporary art market operates at price-levels exponentially higher than the market for typographic ephemera.   

At the library where I work we collect such type specimens. I have at times chosen and bought them myself for the institution and have subsequently put them on display in ways that look entirely similar to Valentim's display at Andrew Roth. But I foolishly lacked the audacity to claim that my "intervention" had transformed them into my own work.

Vintage Modernism

I amused myself by pulling together several similar modernist alphabets — mostly from the 1920s and mostly from Germany. The Nazis said these letter-forms looked immoral.

One startling discovery everybody makes when they start looking into the history of printing is how common it is for people to attribute deliberate immorality and wickedness to any style of type that departs from contemporary custom.

Sabon

My current reading on MUNI (as I ride back and forth to and from the San Francisco library where I work) is Ransom, David Malouf's miraculously successful retelling of the Priam/Achilles episode from The Iliad. Simone Weil zeroed in on this same episode more than half a century ago in the best commentary on Homer that I have come across in a long reading life. Her essay is called The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force, and she talks mostly about the significance of Priam feeling driven to beg for the body of his son Hector from the semi-divine hero Achilles, Hector's killer. Weil saw Priam from the outside, as a human archetype responding to the grief that violence engenders in all places at all times. Malouf sets himself the task of seeing Priam from the inside by re-imagining a doomed king who may or may not have actually existed several thousand years ago.

The image above is an opening from the American edition of Malouf's short novel. The "Note on the Type" at the back of the book tells us that "the text of this book was set in Sabon, a typeface designed by Jan Tschichold (1902-1974), the well-known German typographer. Based loosely on the original designs by Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561), Sabon is unique in that it was explicitly designed for hotmetal composition on both the Monotype and Linotype machines as well as for filmsetting. Designed in 1966 in Frankfurt, Sabon was named for the famous Lyons punch cutter Jacques Sabon, who is thought to have brought some of Garamond's matrices to Frankfurt."

Tschichold being a great favorite of mine from way back, this conjunction of a great story and a great typeface caused me to look up a bit more about Sabon. The page immediately below is from Christopher Burke's Active Literature : Jan Tschichold and the New Typography (London : Hyphen Press, 2007). It reproduces one of Tschichold's preliminary drawings from 1960 showing serifed, italic and sanserif versions of Sabon.



The 1965 drawing below – right on the verge of the actual production of Sabon – is reproduced from Ruari McLean's Jan Tschichold : Typographer (Boston : David R. Godine, 1975).



Elongated center-justified five-line dedication (below, all caps) is from Jan Tschichold, Designer : The Penguin Years by Richard B. Doubleday (London : Lund Humphries, 2006). Sabon arrived too late to be part of the story told in this book. Tschichold left Penguin in 1949 more than ten years before he began to conceive Sabon. That fact, it seems to me, makes the gesture all the more graceful (on the part of the author and/or designer and/or publisher), setting the text in Tschichold's most beautiful typeface even though it postdates the Penguin years.





Finally, above, the cover of an essay collection published in 1991, also set in Sabon. The group of German printers who commissioned the typeface requested that it be "easy and pleasant to read and suitable for all printing purposes."

Yellow & Pink

Pasted up on hoardings here and there around the Mission in San Francisco. Two declarative sentences in yellow and one imperative in pink. A low-budget ad campaign entirely reliant on typography. I think we should give Diesel credit for that, even considering that the expensively trendy garments they sell have a distressing tendency to disintegrate. "BE STUPID and pay $180 for a pair of adorable canvas shoes that you will only be able to wear about half a dozen times before they fall off your feet."

Penguin Scores

I wonder if any commercial publisher today would even consider issuing a series with covers governed by such restrained design rules as the Penguins observed in the middle of the 20th century under Tschichold's influence. David R. Godine, the Boston publisher, at one time did send many of his books out into the world looking approximately as decorous as these, but in more recent years he has opted for the same busy & shiny pictorial look as everybody else.

Images here.

Phoebus-Palast

Found a new source (or fairly new, published last year by Thames & Hudson) about my personal favorite among graphic designers of the past: Jan Tschichold : Master Typographer : His Life, Work & Legacy. It includes a chapter by Martin E. Le Coultre about early work in Munich.

The posters for Phoebus-Palast cinema were Tschichold's first large commission and one in which he was given much latitude to experiment. In late 1926 the Phoebus-Palast was opened with great fanfare as a branch of the Berlin company Phoebus AG. It was the largest cinema in Germany at that time, with seating for 2,174 movie patrons. An orchestra of fifty musicians was available to accompany the films. (It would be some years before the arrival of the "talkies.") ...

Tschichold seized the opportunity to create for the cinema what today would be called a corporate identity: posters, newspaper advertisements, and programs all formed a unity. Just as the posters stood out in the streets, the ads were prominent in the newspapers. This was vital exposure, since the illuminated advertising used by cinemas in other cities was forbidden in Munich. ...

In the short time between the announcement of the film and its screening (sometimes only a week), it was impractical to design a decorative poster, have it transferred to stone and then lithographed. By sheer necessity Tschichold worked from small sketches that he further developed on site at the printers.

The examples below were all issued in 1927.

The Night of Love

The Beloved Rogue

Napoleon


Prince Louis Ferdinand


The Woman Without a Name


The Pair of Trousers

Kiki


The General


Sins Against the Child


Ivan the Terrible


The Three Nobodies

Ikea Changes Fonts

I don't see many feature stories in The New York Times (or in any other mass-market news source, for that matter) about typography, but one showed up yesterday. In the Times Arts section, Edward Rothstein wrote an article from which the following is extracted –

... when Ikea casually abandoned its version of the famed 20th-century font Futura that had served it for 50 years and replaced it for 2010 with the computer-screen font Verdana, professional outrage was immense.

We tend to think of text as semantically invisible, the letters being mere tools used clearly to display words, which convey the true meanings. But no one who actually wants you to pay attention to those meanings risks thinking that way: advertisers, logo designers, magazine and book publishers and catalog creators spend millions on fonts because they know the medium has a message. 

The design blog idsgn.org presented examples of the Ikea catalog’s look, before and after. At a quick glance they are more similar than distinct; after all, Ikea didn’t replace its own font, known as Ikea Sans, with anything like Comic Sans. But the differences rankled readers. “Yuck,” “sad,” “idiots,” “repulsive,” the comments read. “Do they want to look cheaper?!”

When the change was noticed, toward the end of August, Twitterers twitted mercilessly: “Words can’t describe my disgust,” read one from Melbourne, Australia. The comments grew even more heated on Typophile (typophile.com/node/61222). An online petition pleading with Ikea to “get rid of Verdana” has a steadily growing list that on Friday contained more than 5,000 signatures, having nearly doubled in a week. 

“We’re surprised,” the Ikea spokeswoman Camilla Meiby said. “But I think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that interested.”

Library Books

The Scarlet Button was published in 1945. This copy is from the library where I work in San Francisco. I wonder if the playful typography of the title page is not in fact reflecting a certain brief post-war euphoria?


The spines above belong to new books about to be cataloged and sent out into the collection. I only catalog the art books and literature. The political and business and spiritual books bore me, while the math and science books mystify me, so I stick with art and literature – and music and film and photography and fashion and architecture and typography. Plus whatever is older than the 19th century.


One of the tail pieces from a Venetian book printed in 1640 concerning the ongoing wars between the Holy Roman Emperor (and his allies) against Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (and his allies). The Thirty Years War, people later came to call it. This is the sort of book I (or some other librarian or scholar) might still discover in the ordinary circulating collection – and then it would probably come to me to be transferred into the Rare Book Room – to give it a better chance of surviving longer.


The same book, closer to the beginning. The first hundred pages of this Venetian history of the wars with the Swedish king show dark irregular staining. Long-ago smoke damage?

The large woodcut initial G (at the beginning of the author's note to the reader) appears to contain a frilly tulip-blossom. Tulip-mania flourished across Europe just in these years.