Marcel Breuer, Feininger, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters,
Piet Zwart, Man Ray, all the great names of the movement. Tschichold was
deeply impressed and immediately committed.

Curiously, the Bauhaus artists tended to use type as a component of abstract
art rather than for communication. Their typography was wild, sensational,
eye-catching, but in terms of legibility, impractical. They were trying to do
other things. It is significant that in the massive 1968 catalogue of the 50
Years Bauhaus exhibition shown in Stuttgart and London, the typography
(by Herbert Bayer) is all in sanserif, and entirely without capital letters-a
good example of theory ignoring practicality. Capital letters, like punctuation
marks, are functional, since they signal the beginnings of sentences, proper
names, different meanings of words, and so on. To omit all capital letters
simply makes printed matter a little more difficult to read.

Tschichold, of all the early practitioners of ‘modern typography’, was the
only one whose earliest training was in lettering and calligraphy. He
understood better than anyone else what was involved in communication by
means of printing. He became the first to offer a coherent philosophy of
design by which all typographic problems - not just books, but magazines,
newspapers and all the important clutter of day-to-day commercial ephemera
- could be tackled in ways that were rational, suited to modern production
techniques, and aesthetically satisfying.

From 19Z5 onwards Tschichold proclaimed his philosophy of typographic
design (which at the time was revolutionary) in a series of articles and books.
His first publication was in the October 1925 issue of the Leipzig printing
periodical Typographische Mitteilungen (‘Typographic News’, see pp. 30-3).

It was a special number called ‘Elementare Typographie’, which he designed
and largely wrote himself, under the name of Ivan Tschichold - the artists of
Russia being at that time a strong influence. This manifesto, containing ideas
completely new to most ordinary printers in Europe, was widely noticed.
Then his first book, Die neue Typographie, was published in 1928 in Berlin.
The text, of considerable importance in the history of typographic thought,
was not translated into English until the present writer did so in the late
i96os,iand was not published in English until the University of California
Press did so in 1995.

The book, written with passionate conviction, reflects its time. Piet
Mondrian’s words form a preface: ‘wir [stehen] an einer Wende der Kultur’,

‘we are at a turning point of civilisation’. Tschichold’s first chapter, entitled
‘The new world-view’, contains the words ‘Instead of recognizing and
designing for the laws of machine production, the previous generation
contented itself with trying anxiously to follow a tradition that was in any
case only imaginary. Before them stand the works of today, untainted by the
past, primary shapes which identify the aspect of our time: Car Aeroplane
Telephone Wireless Factory Neon-advertising New York! These objects,
designed without reference to the aesthetics of the past, have been created by
a new kind of man: the engineer!’

The whole book must be read to grasp Tschichold’s vision, but we may also
quote (from page 68 in the English translation): ‘Asymmetry is the rhythmic
expression of functional design’ and ‘The liveliness of asymmetry is also an
expression of our own movement and that of modern life’. Of type, he writes
(pp.75-8): ‘I find the best face in use today is the so-called ordinary jobbing
sanserif, which is quiet and easy to read’ (and in which the book is set).

Also: ‘We require from type plainness, clarity, the rejection of everything that
is superfluous’. But on page 75 he also says, in relation to ‘national scripts,
which contradict present day transnational bonds between people’, ‘Roman
type is the international typeface of the future’.

Not only the text but also the design of Die neue Typographie is of
outstanding interest. It was not intended as a fine limited edition, but as a
working text for compositors and printers. Nevertheless it has both elegance
and originality, qualities which recur in nearly everything that Tschichold
designed. The flexible case, in black linen with silver blocking on the spine,
is pleasant to touch. The text pages, in a contemporary (non-artist-designed)
sanserif, are printed on a non-shiny, slightly off-white text paper. The
typography is not assertive (as was so much Bauhaus typography) but
expressive and practical; and the book begins unforgettably with a solid
black frontispiece. The book was reprinted in facsimile in Berlin in 1987; the
binding is just a fraction stiffer, the paper just a little too white and shiny, the
whole effect just missing the subtle qualities of the first edition.

Tschichold continued writing and designing, not only books but all kinds of
printing, including the now famous series of film posters for the Phoebus-
Palast Cinema in Munich (see pp.38-9).

In the few years between 1928 and 1933, Tschichold was formulating a
completely new philosophy of typographic design. How different it was from