MODERN TYPOGRAPHY
AN ESSAY IN CRITICAL HISTORY
Robin Kinross
Robin Kinross: MODERN TYPOGRAPHY: AN ESSAY IN CRITICAL HISTORY. London: Hyphen Press, 1992. First edition Quarto. Printed French folded wrappers. 206 pp. 32 items illustrated in black in white. Former owners pencil signature to front free endpaper. Wrapper fore edges lightly worn, otherwise a very good to nearly fine copy.
6.75 x 9.5 softcover book with 206 pages and 32 items illustrated in black in white. “But what makes this book a must-read for all designers, and for my proposed accreditation course, is that it is the first history of typography with a critical thesis. As typography becomes more fashionable, and graphic design more democratic, the design books of the furture must strive for this level of intellectual rigor or become trivial by default.” Steven Heller, Print, March/April 1994.
A brisk tour through the history of Western typography, from the time (c.1700 in France and England) when it can be said to have become ‘modern’. A spotlight is directed at different cultures in different times, to trace the developments and shifts in modern typography. Attention is given to ideas, to social context, and to technics, thus stepping over the limited and tired tropes of stylistic analysis.
Contents
- Preface & acknowledgements
- Modern typography
- Enlightenment origins
- The nineteenth-century complex
- Reaction and rebellion
- Traditional values in a new world
- New traditionalism
- Cultures of printing: Germany
- Cultures of printing: the Low Countries
- New typography
- Emigration of the modern
- Aftermath and renewal
- Swiss typography
- Modernity after modernism
- Examples: work by Edward Johnston, W.A. Dwiggins, Eric Gill, Johannes Molzahn, Wihelm Lesemann, Jan Tschichold, Ladislav Sutnar, Willem Sandberg, Anthony Froshaug, Siegfried Odermatt, Richard Hollis, Jost Hochuli, Karel Martens, and others.
- Postscript on reproduction
- Sources: commentary
- Sources: bibliography
- Index
This history of typography starts with the early years of the Enlightenment in Europe, around 1700. It was then that typography began to be distinct from printing. Instructional manuals were published, a record of the history of printing began to be constructed, and the direction of the printing processes was taken up by a new figure: the typographer. This starting point gives the discussion a special focus, missing from existing printing and design history. Modern typography is seen as more than just a modernism of style. Rather it is the attempt to work in the spirit of rationality, for clear and open communication. This idea is argued out in the introductory chapter.
The chapters that follow trace the history of typography up to the present moment. Different cultures and countries become the focus for the discussion, as they become significant. In the nineteenth century, Britain provides the main context for modern typography. In the twentieth century, the USA and certain continental European countries are prominent. Kinross provides concise accounts of modernist typography in Central Europe between the wars and in Switzerland in the 1950s and 1960s. Traditionalist typography in the USA, Britain, Germany and the Low Countries is also discussed sympathetically. A concluding chapter considers ‘modern typography’ in the light of the social, political and technical changes of the recent period.
A separate chapter of illustrations resumes the argument. Representative examples are shown, and analysed in captions.
The book concludes with a critical discussion of the literature of typographic history, and a full bibliography.
Robin Kinross is proprietor of Hyphen Press. After graduating (1975) and postgraduating (1979) from the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, he began to do ‘editorial typography’ (editing and design in one process) as well as write about typography. In 1980, while still living in Reading, he re-edited and re-published Norman Potter’s What is a designer as the first book under the imprint of Hyphen Press. In 1982 he moved to London, did behind-the-scenes work for Pluto Press’s political atlases and began to write journalism, especially for the magazine Blueprint in its golden period of the late 1980s. When his book Modern typography came out in 1992, this signalled the start of Hyphen Press as the full-time occupation that it is now. Impatient with authors slow to complete promised works, he resorted to publishing his own words again in the book Unjustified texts (2002). Other books to which he has contributed include Otto Neurath’s Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften (1991) and Jan Tschichold’s The new typography (1995).