The New
Typography
by Jan
Tschichold; translated from German by
Ruari McLean, Introduction by Robin Kinross,
with a New Foreword by Richard Hendel
California University Press, Berkeley,
Los Angeles & London, 2006
286 pp., illus. 110 b/w, 38 three-col.
Paper, $32.50/ £21.50
ISBN: 978-0-520-25012-3.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts
Leuven, Belgium
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
Published for the first time in 1928,
sold out a few years later, out of print
in German for many decades, available
for the Anglophone readership in 1995
(in a facsimile edition by California
UP), and now reprinted with a new foreword,
Tschichold’s The New Typography
is a book of almost mythic dimensions.
Considered the definitive treatise of
typographic design of the modernist era,
it offers not only an overview of the
principles of commercial and book design,
but also a historical——and ideologically
far from neutral——discussion
of "old" (1450-1914) and "new"
(since 1914) typography. The book’s
exceptional fame is due to its own typographic
achievement as well as to its commitment
to the politics of modern typography,
defined as both the mirror and the condition
of a modern social-democracy in the machine
age. Representing the aesthetic credo
of certain aspects of the Bauhaus at a
certain moment in its evolution, Tschichold——who
had personal but no formal links with
the Bauhaus——explains in a very
didactic way and relying upon numerous
speaking examples the necessity of a complete
rejection of almost every traditional
rule of typography, defending the sans
serif against the serif, the asymmetry
in page lay-out against symmetry, the
use of photography and its equality with
the text against a merely illustrative
use of engravings, the valorization of
white space against its classic reduction
to the margins of the print-block, the
diminution of capitals against the ancient
orthography, the imperative of standardization
against the disarray of artistic freedom,
etc. Moreover, all these fundamental shifts,
which we do not longer notice for in many
cases the revolutionary proposals of the
Central-European modernists that have
been widely adopted all over the world
and are still taught in many schools of
typography and design, are motivated by
a series of ideological justifications,
which foreground democracy and efficiency,
establishing a clear relationship between
the former and the latter. In modern society,
there is no room left for the divide between
the happy few of individual artists and
the unhappy crowd of consumers. Instead,
freedom for all is seen as the logic result
of the intervention of the engineer who
brings order into chaos and enables all
members of society to enjoy a fuller life
(the analogy between Tschichold and Le
Corbusier is more than symbolic).
The particular status of Tschichold’s
book, marvellously printed in this edition
and a joy of seeing, reading and holding
and keeping in one’s hand, is quite
strange, for there are as many reasons
to continue to read The New Typography
than to consider it a dusty museum piece.
In a certain sense, the modernist revolution
didactically exposed by Tschichold (who
was as much a teacher as a real inventor,
despite the great quality of his own work
as a designer), has become the victim
of its success and what appeared to be
highly innovative in 1928 has become mainstream
and formulaic today. Moreover, Tschichold
himself has gradually turned away from
the convictions of his youth, to the extent
that at the end of his life he had become
a strong supporter of the age-old traditions
in book typography, a technological and
cultural form that in his eyes had achieved
its definitive closure since various centuries.
And The New Typography is not deprived
of serious flaws: as a handbook, it has
proven extremely useful for the reinvention
of commercial typography, but on book
design it remained almost completely silent,
for example. Finally, Tschichold’s
ideological plea for rationalization is
no longer acceptable by contemporary readers,
who have other ideas on the merits of
bureaucracy and streamlining.
Yet despite all these problems, The
New Typography is a book that can
and should keep a strong appeal to a 21st
Century readership. First, by cross-cutting
between technology and culture, politics
and theory, artwork and social issues,
Tschichold remains a wonderful example
of an artist’s contribution to the
field of critical thinking. Second, the
basic typographical stance of the book
has nothing left of its utility and correctness:
Tschichold’s craving for a simple
typography that would be at the service
of the text and offer the reader a maximal
transparency is in fact a classic conviction
in modernist cloths that still holds today.
Third, many of the examples given by The
New Typography are unrivalled in their
intelligence and beauty. In comparison
with the work by two of Tschichold’s
friends, El Lissitzky and Moholoy-Nagy,
the typographical compositions of this
book may seem less visionary or poetic,
yet this default is more than compensated
by the clarity of the design and the didactic
framing of the works. Fourth, one can
only thank the University of California
Press for reediting this new edition on
such a timely moment. Since the first
English edition, the possibilities of
typographic and multimedia design on the
Internet have been enlarged to such an
extent that many users of the screen would
be delighted if Tschichold’s "ars
poetica" could help to bring some
order in the creative chaos we are experiencing
today.
