Tschichold Afterthoughts

Robin Kinross – who knows more about Tschichold than I – showed up in comments to my Tschichold post to object that the book I said was pretty good is actually a shameful mess. Kinross wrote the introduction to Tschichold’s The New Typography [amazon]. It’s the first English edition of that book, hence a very welcome thing. (Reading Kinross’s intro was part of my preparation for writing my review.) Kinross points out that Master Typographer has garnered some negative reviews – this one, for example. There are really two complaints here: first, the book itself – oversized and weighing in at 5 pounds, lots of pages with only a little writing on them, photos of the subject and others arguably just padding it out – is un-Tschicholdian in design. This is quite true. But I guess I think Tschichold was a bit over-strict, and that some of the slightly weird decisions the designers of this volume made actually work out ok. Or maybe I’m a sucker for coffee table art book monstrosities, when they contain lots of material I actually want to look at.

A more serious complaint is that the writings in Master Typographer are not just mutually uncoordinated, as I noted, but individually sloppy and inaccurate. Kinross says the only full-length monograph about Tschichold I’ve actually read – Doubleday’s[amazon] – is an amateurish mess. Hence Doubleday’s contribution to this Master Typographer volume is not the informative thing I claimed it is, but a mess. Well, this is news to me. I thought the Doubleday was very interesting, but now I pass along the credible allegation that it’s problematic. The Carter review says the same as Kinross: namely, the contents of Master Tyopgrapher need fact checking. I’m not nearly as qualified as Kinross to judge. Then again, I’m not as qualified as Doubleday either. At least one criticism of Doubleday from the Carter review seems to me over-reaching:

Doubleday’s grasp of the material does not seem to have improved since his earlier book was written. He makes the remarkable claim that in England, Tschichold ”helped to bring forth a resurgence of classical typography and book design.” This would have come as a considerable surprise to Stanley Morison, Oliver Simon, and countless other designers in a land barely touched by modernism. Rather, Tschichold, while working within the existing tradition, had a profoundly beneficial influence in raising standards of design. The before-and-after examples of title-pages in the King Penguin series show how he took pedestrian layouts, tightened them up, and injected elements of imagination and wit which have greatly inspired designers who came after him.

Doubleday’s point wasn’t that England had been conquered by modernism, and needed to be taken back for classicism, just that English, basically classical book designs were undistinguished before Tschichold gave them the treatment. So Carter is basically not willing to agree to agree. Well, anyway.

I’ll leave it at that. (I’m still waiting for my school library to get hold of the new Christopher Burke book about Tschichold, Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography [amazon]. Kinross is the publisher, and I have high hopes, since Burke’s Paul Renner book was great. So I feel a bit chagrined to be getting on Kinross’s bad side.)

In other news, I cranked out a couple of S&O pages for the Tschicholdian occasion.