what had gone before can be seen when it is compared with the best work
being done at that time in England by, for example, Stanley Morison, Oliver
Simon and Francis Meynell.

Then the Nazis struck. The new typography and the modern movement in
art became a political issue in Germany and was labelled decadent - a
feeling, it must be remembered, not without its supporters in England. The
Nazis wanted Germany’s printing and lettering to be in black letter.
Tschichold’s teaching post in Munich was cancelled, and he and his wife
were placed in ‘protective custody’ - she for a few days, he for six weeks.
Tschichold, not being a Jew, was allowed to emigrate. In 1933 he moved
with his wife and young son to Switzerland, where he had been offered a
small retainer by a publisher in Basel, Benno Schwabe.

For the first few years in Switzerland Tschichold was in a fairly precarious
position: there was the constant fear of losing his work permit and even
permission to stay in Switzerland. His work was almost entirely confined to
designing books, and he found that the asymmetry he had been preaching
was not much liked by the conventional Swiss and was often actually
unsuitable. He began to realise that in typographic design, asymmetry and
symmetry are not mutually exclusive philosophies but different ways of
achieving the same end: they can and must live together.

In Autumn 1935 his next (actually, his sixth) book was published by Benno
Schwabe, Typographische Gestaltung (‘Typographic Design’, see pp. 50-1). It
is as elegant in production as Die neue Typographie, but shows significant
developing ideas in design. The text is set not in sanserif but in a small size
of Bodoni, well leaded, and the title page is set in three contrasting faces: the
author’s name in a script, the title in an Egyptian (Trump’s City), and the
publisher in Bodoni. City is also used throughout for headings. The text
gives a most valuable account of the art of typography, accepting both
symmetric (centred) and asymmetric design. The book was soon translated
into Danish, Swedish and Dutch, but not into English: that had to wait until
1967 and the sponsorship of an enlightened typesetting firm in Toronto. In
England in 1935, typography, when it was thought about at all, was firmly
rooted in tradition, as practised by Morison, Simon and Meynell. The
modern movement, in art and architecture as well as typography, was
familiar to only a few. Nevertheless, Tschichold’s work was beginning to be
noticed. At the suggestion of McKnight Kauffer, the great American designer
then practising in London, Tschichold was invited to have a small exhibition

of his work in the London office of Lund Humphries, at that time one of the
most technically advanced and forward-looking printers in the country. Two
years later, he was even invited to read a paper on ‘A new approach to
typography’ to the Double Crown Club in London. But the design of the
dinner menu (see p.54), always an important feature of these occasions,
shows a childish misunderstanding of Tschichold’s subject. His new approach
was, however, clearly shown in the design of The Penrose Annual made for
Lund Humphries in 1938.

Tschichold continued during the war to design books for Swiss publishers.

His most important commission was the Birkhäuser classics, a series in
pocket size for which he designed some fifty-three titles. These were seen and
admired in London by Oliver Simon. Tschichold was now also enhancing his
reputation with a number of authoritative illustrated books on the history of
lettering and typography, in particular Geschichte der Schrift in Bildern in
1941 (republished as An Illustrated History of Writing and Lettering by
Zwemmer in London in 1946), and a splendid landscape volume of 200
plates, Schatzkammer der Schreibkunst, in 1945.

* Я- Я-

Penguin Books were first published in 1935. It is difficult now to imagine
what these paperback novels at sixpence each meant to younger people (and
older ones too) who up until then could only afford to borrow the books
they wanted to read. During the world war that followed, they proved to be
an unbelievable blessing to the troops, and to civilians. They could be carried
in gas-mask bags, and often the gas-mask was left out to accommodate more
Penguins. When the war was over, Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder, had a fast
growing business to organise and had the genius to realise that he needed not
just any designer, but the best in the world that he could buy. Where could
he find that person? He asked many people, including the present writer, and
we all replied that there were plenty of good designers in this country, that
there was no need to go abroad. Oliver Simon recommended Jan Tschichold.
Allen Lane, as on many other occasions, rejected the advice of the majority.
He and Oliver Simon crossed to Switzerland and engaged Tschichold to
become the Penguin typographical supremo. He arrived in March 1947.

Before he came over, Tschichold asked for a copy of every single piece of
printed paper used by Penguin, as well as examples of all their books. By
that time, over 500 different titles had been published as Penguins, and there

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