OCTAVO. JOURNAL OF TYPOGRAPHY: 88.6
[Environment issue]
Michael Burke, Mark Holt, Simon Johnston, Hamish Muir [Editors]
Michael Burke, Mark Holt, Simon Johnston, Hamish Muir [Editors]: OCTAVO. JOURNAL OF TYPOGRAPHY 88.6 [Environment issue]. London: Eight Five Zero, January 1989. First edition, published in an edition of 3,000 copies. Vellum wrappers faintly worn and spotted. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine printed vellum jacket.
8.25 x 11.75 journal with 16pp text, 4pp cover, 8pp trace jacket. 4-colour process, 2 varnishes. 36,000 die-stamped impressions: four weeks to print and 16 to finish! Elaborate design and production.
Contents:
Signs of Revolution. Martin Pawley. Argues for a reassessment of the changing relationship between signs and buildings.
Printed Time. Barry Kitts. Charts the fascinating development of typographic convention in timetable design from the 1830s to the present day.
Highway Codes. Neil Parker. Reveals the secrets of registration plate coding systems from around the world, accompanied by die-stamped colour examples of plates photographed from his extensive collection.
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