OCTAVO. JOURNAL OF TYPOGRAPHY: 86.1
Michael Burke, Mark Holt, Simon Johnston, Hamish Muir [Editors]
Michael Burke, Mark Holt, Simon Johnston, Hamish Muir [Editors]: OCTAVO. JOURNAL OF TYPOGRAPHY 86.1. London: Eight Five Zero, August 1986. First edition, published in an edition of 3,000 copies. Trace of wear to front vellum wrapper, otherwise a fine copy in printed vellum wrappers.
8.25 x 11.75 journal with 16pp text, 4pp cover, 8pp trace jacket. 5 colours: black, red, grey, grey, grey varnish. Elaborate design and production.
Contents:
Technics and Ethnics: The Work of Anthony Froshaug. Robin Kinross. Providing a unique insight into the work of this important typographer who combined an experience and understanding of European modernist design principles with a very English approach to typographic convention.
Information Texture. April Greiman. On the design potential of the Mac.
Richard Long's Art of Words. Richard Reason. Addresses the use of type in Long's art, making this an important documentation of this aspect of the artist's work.
Simplicity of form is never a poverty, it is a great virtue.
— Jan Tschichold, quoted by the editors in issue 1.
This independent journal of typography was started with the intended aim of raising the level of awareness and discussion of typography in graphic design, poetry, the environment and art, to an international audience of fellow designers and typographers. The first issue was published in 1986 and the projected frequency was one issue every six months, with an emphasis upon the quality of printing and production. The magazine was scheduled to run to only 8 issues, as the name would suggest. That goal was met, but the time frame wasn't.
If such a schedule suggested seriousness of purpose and a precise agenda of ideas, this was more than confirmed by the early issues. Two members of the team had studied with Wolfgang Weingart in Basel, and Octavo had a high-mindedness and purity that set it apart intellectually and aesthetically from both the commercial and 'style' wings of contemporary British graphics. Octavo was sternly opposed to typographic mediocrity, nostalgia, fashion, decoration, symmetry, centered type and the hated serif. It was for a semantically determined use of structure and the infinite possibilities of typographic experimentation. 'We take an international, modernist stance,' the first editorial concluded. 'This is necessary in England.
-- Rick Poynor