EXPERIMENTA TYPOGRAFICA 2: GESUNDHEIT
Inscribed to Gyorgy Kepes

Willem H. J. B. Sandberg: EXPERIMENTA TYPOGRAFICA 2: GESUNDHEIT. Köln: Galerie der Spiegel, 1969. A fine softcover booklet in stiff, french-folded wrappers. INSCRIBED FROM WILLEM SANDBERG IN FRIENDSHIP TO MR. & MRS. G[YORGY] KEPES on title page -- A significant association copy.

5.5 x 8.75 perfect-bound booklet printed in three colors thorughout on a variety of paper stocks, ranging from translucent vellum to thick brown packing paper.

Looking at this booklet leaves me speechless-- so I had better let a more objective voice take over. Here's Herbert Spencer's review:

"Like the catalogues of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum of which Sandberg is director, Experimenta Typografica is an exciting and stimulating publication. Published by Galerie der Spiegel, Cologne, the "manuscript" dates from 1944 and the experiments and exercises reproduced were made by Sandberg, then actively engaged in resisting the German occupation forces in Holland, during a period when he was in hiding in the country.

"The experiments reveal Sandberg's enormous enthusiasm for typography. The results are imaginative, robust and appropriate, and reflect the sensitive discrimination with which the quotations have been selected."

What more can I add?

György Kepes (1906 - 2002) was a friend and collaborator of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Also of Hungarian descent, Kepes worked with Moholy first in Berlin and then in London before emigrating to the US in 1937. He was educated at the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In his early career he gave up painting for filmmaking. This he felt was a better medium for artistically expressing his social beliefs. From 1930 to 1937 he worked off and on with Moholy-Nagy and through him, first in Berlin and then in London, met Walter Gropius and the science writer J. J. Crowther. In 1937, he was invited by Moholy to run the Color and Light Department at the New Bauhaus and later at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He taught there until 1943. In 1944 he wrote his landmark book Language of Vision. This text was influential in articulating the Bauhaus principles as well as the Gestalt theories. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1974 and in 1967 he established the Center for Advanced Studies. During his career he also designed for the Container Corporation of America and Fortune magazine as well as Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown.

out of stock