UNJUSTIFIED TEXTS
PERSPECTIVES ON TYPOGRAPHY
Robin Kinross
Robin Kinross: UNJUSTIFIED TEXTS: PERSPECTIVES ON TYPOGRAPHY. London: Hyphen Press, 2002. First edition Quarto. Plain white wrappers. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 391 pp. Illustrated in black in white. Former owners pencil signature to front free endpaper. Jacket lightly worn, otherwise a very good to nearly fine copy.
5 x 8.25 softcover book with 391 pages and lightly illustrated in black in white. Over twenty-five years of engagement, somewhere in the borderlands between journalism and the academy, Robin Kinross has written for magazines and journals, making a case for typography as a matter of fine detail and subtle judgement, whose products concern all of us, every day. This selection of his shorter writings brings his major themes into focus: the unsung virtues of editorial and information design, the fate of Modernism in the twentieth century, the work of dissident and critical Modernist designers, the contributions of emigré designers from Europe in the English-speaking world, the virtues of a socially-oriented design approach.
He argues for a design that is of use in the world, and against the cult of design and the delusions of theory. Pieces move from patient exposition, to sharp critique, to warm appreciation. This book presents an unexpected body of writing, which stakes out fresh territory between the purely academic and the merely journalistic. The whole is an unusual and powerful contribution to the subject of typography.
Contents
- An introduction
- Examples
- Elders, contemporaries:
- Marie Neurath
- Edward Wright
- F.H.K. Henrion
- Jock Kinneir
- Norman Potter
- Adrian Frutiger
- Ken Garland’s writings
- Richard Hollis
- Karel Martens
- MetaDesign, Berlin
- Neville Brody
- The new Dutch telephone book
- LettError
- Evaluations:
- What is a typeface?
- Large and small letters
- Black art
- Newspapers
- Road signs
- Objects of desire
- Letters of credit
- Two histories of lettering
- Eric Gill
- Herbert Read
- Jan Tschichold
- Fifty Penguin years
- Teige animator
- Adorno’s Minima Moralia
- Judging a book by its material embodiment
- The book of Norman
- Adieu aesthetica
- Best books
- The Oxford dictionary for writers and editors
- The typography of indexes
- Stages of the modern:
- Universal faces, ideal characters
- The Bauhaus again
- New typography in Britain after 1945
- Unjustified text and the zero hour
- Emigré graphic designers
- Signs and readers:
- Semiotics and designing
- Notes after the text
- Fellow readers
- Index
Over twenty-five years Robin Kinross has written for publication in magazines and journals, making a case for typography as a matter of fine detail and subtle judgement, whose products concern all of us, every day. This selection of his shorter writings – including some previously unpublished – brings his major themes into focus: the unsung virtues of editorial design and of information design, the fate of Modernism in the twentieth century, the work of dissident and critical Modernist designers, the contributions of emigré designers from Europe in the English-speaking world, the virtues of a socially-oriented design approach. He argues for a design that is of use in the world, and against the cult of design and the delusions of theory. The out-of-print pamphlet Fellow readers (1994) is reprinted in full. A separate section of illustrations with extended critical captions presents these themes in a direct and accessible way. Kinross introduces the book with a fresh essay that recalls just how these pieces came into existence. The book presents an unexpected body of writing, which stakes out fresh territory between the purely academic and the merely journalistic.
Hyphen Press is a London-based publisher founded by Robin Kinross in 1980. It has produced around thirty books on a diverse range of topics, but most of its publications are devoted to typography and graphic design.
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).