THE FORM OF THE BOOK
ESSAYS ON THE MORALITY OF GOOD DESIGN
Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold: THE FORM OF THE BOOK: ESSAYS ON THE MORALITY OF GOOD DESIGN. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley and Marks, Publishers, 1991. Originally published in German as "Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie" by Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 1975. A fine softcover book with printed stiff wrappers. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. 5.75 x 9.25 scarce softcover book with 180 pages and approx. 50 b/w illustrations. Translated from the German by Hajo Hadeler. Edited with an introduction by Robert Bringhurst. These 23 essays encompass some 35 years of Tschichold's career from "House Rules for Typesetting" (1937) to "Ten Common Mistakes in the Production of Books" (1975).
Excerpted from Brittanica's online entry for Jan Tschichold: "The 1923 exhibition of the Bauhaus at Weimar introduced him to Modernist design, and he quickly joined the movement, rejecting traditional fonts and symmetrical composition and instead embracing sans-serif typefaces, geometric construction, and asymmetrical composition. His work, intended to represent the rationalism of the modern age, was functional, aesthetically satisfying, and designed for reproduction by machine-type composition and newer printing technology. Tschichold moved to the forefront of modern design with ³elementare typographie,² a special issue of the trade journal Typographische Mitteilungen in 1925, and with his book, Die neue Typographie (1928; The New Typography; A Handbook for Modern Designers) . . . .
"After Tschichold was arrested in 1933 by the Nazis for being a 'cultural Bolshevik,' he fled to Switzerland and worked as a book designer. For that reason, his Typographische Gestaltung (1935; Asymmetric Typography) and other works were first published in Basel. Finding that some of the absolute rules of modern typography were too close in spirit to the fascist movement, he at this time began to work with more traditional typefaces and layout arrangements. Tschichold designed books for numerous Swiss and German book publishers, became design consultant to the Hoffman-La Roche pharmaceutical company, and designed the widely used Sabon typeface. From 1947 to 1949 Tschichold was typographic designer for Penguin Books in London, where he designed more than 500 title pages and specified the future typography for the Penguin series of paperbacks."
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