Tschichold Changed His Mind
In 1928 he wrote the manifesto. Twenty years later he wrote the Penguin Composition Rules and repudiated most of it. A case study in revising a position in public, including what it cost him.
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The Penguin Composition Rules is four pages long. Jan Tschichold wrote it during his two years at Penguin Books, from 1947 to 1949, and handed it to the compositors at the outside printing houses that actually set Penguin's books. It covers text composition, indenting of paragraphs, punctuation marks and spelling, capitals, small capitals and italics, figures, references and footnotes, folios, the printing of plays, the printing of poetry, and make-up. Four pages. That is the whole document that is supposed to represent the reactionary phase of the most notorious modernist typographer in Europe.
Nineteen years earlier the same man had published a 240-page book arguing that centred layout was dead, that serif types belonged to a finished era, and that the only honest typography was asymmetric, sans serif and standardised. He was twenty-six when it came out. Die neue Typographie was published in 1928 by the Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker in Berlin, the publishing arm of the German printers' education association, which means it was aimed squarely at working compositors rather than at an avant-garde audience. It ran to 240 pages in small quarto, printed in black and red, laid out by Tschichold himself, first printing announced as the first to fifth thousand.
Between those two documents is the most instructive reversal in the discipline's history, and almost everything commonly said about it is slightly wrong.
What the young Tschichold actually argued
He had set out his position earlier still. In 1925 he assembled a special issue of the trade journal Typographische Mitteilungen under the title elementare typographie, summarising the new approaches in the form of theses. The 1928 book expanded that into a manual: composition, layout, paper sizes, typeface selection, the integration of photography. The Bard Graduate Center, which mounted an exhibition on the book and its author from 14 February to 7 July 2019 curated by Anne Blood, makes the point that what distinguished it from the other modernist manifestos of the period was its clarity and utility. It told you what to do.
Two of its lines are worth having in front of you, because they show that the argument was never purely formal. On typefaces: none of the typefaces to whose basic form some kind of ornament has been added meet the requirements for clarity and purity. And on blackletter: the emphatically national, exclusivist character of Fraktur contradicts present-day transnational bonds between people.
That second sentence is political, and it appeared five years before the politics caught up with it.
March 1933
Ten days after the Nazi seizure of power, Tschichold and his wife were arrested at their home in Munich. Armed police searched the flat and found Soviet posters. The charge, in the language of the period, was cultural Bolshevism. He was held, released, and got his family out to Switzerland in August 1933.
How long he was held is a small thing I cannot settle. Wikipedia and Martin McClellan's account for McSweeney's both say six weeks. Studio International's report of the Bard exhibition says four weeks. I have not found a primary record. The detail that recurs in several accounts, that a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, is the kind of story that survives because it is memorable, and I would treat it with more caution than it usually gets.
What is not in doubt is the shape of the event. A designer whose published position was that national and exclusivist letterforms were obsolete was arrested by a regime that was about to make Fraktur a matter of state, and he spent the rest of his life in exile from the language he wrote in.
The reversal, and the correction that matters
The popular version of this story is a conversion narrative: the modernist was broken by fascism and went back to Garamond. It is tidier than the record.
Sebastian Carter, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in April 2009 and reprinted on Design Observer that July, makes two corrections that between them dismantle the tidy version. The first is about timing: Tschichold had begun moving away from modernism thirty years before Sabon appeared, which places the shift in the 1930s rather than at some dramatic postwar moment. Wikipedia's account agrees, dating the loosening of his rigid position to around 1932, which is to say it began before the arrest.
The second correction is sharper. Carter notes that Tschichold had never rejected classical typography as completely as is suggested, because he had continued to design in a traditional manner for Insel-Verlag right through the twenties and thirties. In other words, during the years he was publicly arguing that centred serif book typography was finished, he was privately and professionally still practising it. Whether you read that as hypocrisy or as the ordinary condition of a working designer with a polemic to sell, it means the reversal was less a change of practice than a change of what he was willing to say in public.
His own summary of it, late in life, is a single sentence: he described himself as the most severe critic of the young Tschichold.
Bill against Tschichold, 1946
The reversal became public property because Max Bill attacked it in print.
In December 1945 Tschichold gave a lecture in Zurich to members of the Swiss Graphic Designers on constants in typography. Bill replied with an essay, Über Typografie, in Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen. Tschichold answered in the following issue with Glaube und Wirklichkeit, which was also issued as an offprint by Verlag Zollikofer & Co. in St Gallen in June 1946.
Here is a correction that costs nothing to make and that I would not have known to make a year ago. The date of Bill's essay is routinely given as April 1946. Hyphen Press records that this confusion persisted for decades and was resolved in 2016, when the researcher Jan Boterman established through the Amsterdam University Library and the Swiss National Library that Bill's piece appeared in the May issue, 1946/5, with Tschichold's reply in 1946/6 in June. Bill's essay was also issued as a Sonderdruck on coated paper, larger than the journal's standard format, which tells you how seriously he intended it to be taken.
Bill's charge, as Fritz K. Park summarises it, was that Tschichold's return to traditional typography was a flight into the traditional and an expression of backward-looking historicism.
Tschichold's answer had three strands, and only one of them is the one people remember.
The first is the political argument, and it is genuinely uncomfortable. He did not claim the modernists were fascists; he was explicit that they were vehement enemies of Nazism. He claimed something worse and more interesting, that without knowing it they stood very close to the mania for order that ruled the Third Reich. The New Typography's intolerant attitude, he wrote, conformed to the German bent for the absolute, and its military will to regulate and its claim to sole authority corresponded to the same national disposition. He said he had only understood this properly from inside a democracy.
The second strand is about technology worship, and it is the one that has aged best:
We need not place halos over them, just because they come off the conveyor belt.
He also observed that the Third Reich had been second to none in pursuing technical progress, a direct answer to the assumption that industrial method carries its own moral content.
The third strand is easy to miss because it is so plain. Traditional book typography, he argued, can be understood by everybody without initiation. That is an accessibility argument. The New Typography needed a reader who had learned how to read it.
Paul Renner added a further contribution in March 1948. This was a public argument in a trade journal read by printers, not a private quarrel between two designers.
What the Penguin Composition Rules actually say
Allen Lane had founded Penguin Books in 1935 and brought Tschichold in as head of typography and production in 1947. The job was not to design a book. It was to impose a standard on a large number of outside printers setting hundreds of titles with no consistent instruction.
The document is not a manifesto and contains almost no theory. Its sections run in this order:
The opening rule gives a measurable target: all text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible, with the spacing set at about a middle space, or the thickness of an "i". That is a specification a compositor can check with a piece of metal in his hand.
The paragraph rule is equally concrete: omit indents in the first line of the first paragraph of any text, and at the beginning of a new section that comes under a subheading. The quotation rule sets single quotes for a first quotation and double quotes for quotations inside them, with opening quotes followed by a hairspace except before A and J. The exception for A and J is the sort of thing that only comes from looking at the setting, because those two capitals have diagonal or descending forms that already leave the space.
Alongside the rules he standardised the object: Monotype Bembo, Monotype Centaur, Eric Gill's Perpetua, Gill Sans with letterspacing specified, a cover format of 4⅜ by 7⅛ inches (110 by 180 mm), and a warmer orange than Penguin had been using.
Enforcing it was the work. His own account of the daily reality is the least romantic sentence written by any famous designer about their most celebrated job: every day he had to wade through miles of corrections, often ten books a day. Over two years he oversaw the redesign of around 500 titles.
What it cost him, and what it did not
Laid side by side, the two positions are closer than the rhetoric on either side suggests.
Question | Die neue Typographie, 1928 | Penguin and after, from 1947 |
|---|---|---|
Layout | Asymmetric, as a matter of principle | More traditional layouts, chosen case by case |
Typeface | Sans serif, ornament removed, historical faces rejected | Bembo, Centaur, Perpetua, with Gill Sans letterspaced by specification |
Basis of authority | The demands of the present age | What can be read by everybody without initiation |
Form of the argument | Theses, in a book, for a movement | Numbered rules, on four pages, for compositors |
Who the reader is | A modern person, assumed | A person holding a cheap paperback, observed |
The cost was real. Bill's accusation of historicism was the mildest version of what was said; the charge of betrayal followed him, and it still shapes how he is taught, which is usually as two people rather than one. He left Penguin in 1949 and returned to Switzerland. Hans Schmoller, born 1916, died 1985, took over and held the post until 1976, so Tschichold's twenty-four months set a house style that ran for another twenty-seven years under someone else.
He went on to design Sabon, worked on from 1964 to 1967 and released jointly by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel in 1967. German printers had commissioned a face that would set identically by hand, on Monotype and on Linotype, with italic and bold held to exactly the roman's widths because of Linotype's duplex casting, and five per cent narrower than Monotype Garamond to save space. The romans follow Claude Garamond, the italics Robert Granjon. That is a thoroughly modern brief, standardisation across incompatible machines under a width constraint, executed in a sixteenth-century form. The Form of the Book, published after his death in 1975, carries the subtitle essays on the morality of good design, and it is not a joke. He died at Locarno on 11 August 1974.
Carter records that his list of ten common mistakes in book production opens with books that are needlessly large, needlessly wide and needlessly heavy. Nothing about that sentence would have embarrassed the author of 1928.
What I take from it
The thing I find genuinely difficult about this case is not that he changed his mind. It is the reason he gave. He did not say the New Typography was ugly, or that it had dated, or that clients would not buy it. He said its structure of belief, the intolerance, the claim to be the only legitimate approach, the certainty that history had a direction and he was facing it, resembled something he had been arrested by. He indicted his own younger convictions on grounds of form rather than content, and the grounds he chose apply to anyone holding any position that way.
That is a much harder retraction than admitting an error of fact, and the only kind worth anything, because an error of fact is corrected by new information and this one could only be corrected by living somewhere else for thirteen years.
The other thing worth taking is the form the second position took. When he had something dogmatic to say he wrote 240 pages. When he had something he was confident about he wrote four. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I notice that the four pages are still being read.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Jan Tschichold". Born 2 April 1902 Leipzig, died 11 August 1974 Locarno; Die neue Typographie, 1928, Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker, Berlin; the 1925 elementare typographie issue of Typographische Mitteilungen; the March 1933 arrest and six weeks' detention; escape in August 1933; the shift beginning around 1932; Penguin 1947 to 1949 and 500 paperbacks. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold
Wikipedia, "Penguin Composition Rules". Allen Lane's founding of Penguin in 1935; Tschichold as head of typography and production 1947 to 1949; the four-page booklet and its sections; Bembo, Centaur, Perpetua and letterspaced Gill Sans; the 4⅜ by 7⅛ inch (110 by 180 mm) cover; the warmer orange; "miles of corrections (often ten books daily)". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Composition_Rules
Tschichold, Jan, Penguin Composition Rules, Penguin Books, 1947. Facsimile. Section order and the verbatim rules on word spacing, first-line indents and quotation marks. plain-xetex.neocities.org/typography/penguinrules.pdf
Park, Fritz K., "The 1946 Dispute Between Max Bill and Jan Tschichold", Journal of Korean Society of Typography, vol. 6 no. 2. The December 1945 Zurich lecture; Bill's "Über Typographie" and Tschichold's "Glaube und Wirklichkeit" in Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen; Renner's March 1948 contribution; "backward-looking historicism"; the German bent for the absolute; the conveyor-belt line. koreantypography.org/wp-content/uploads/thesis/kst_journal_v06_n02_2.pdf
Hyphen Press, "Bill 5, Tschichold 6". Jan Boterman's 2016 resolution, via the Amsterdam University Library and the Swiss National Library, that Bill's essay appeared in SGM 1946/5 (May) and Tschichold's reply in 1946/6 (June); the Sonderdruck; translations in Typography papers 4, 2000, edited by Robin Kinross and Chris Burke. hyphenpress.co.uk/bill_5_tschichold_6/
Modernism101, catalogue entry for an inscribed offprint of "Glaube und Wirklichkeit", Verlag Zollikofer & Co., St Gallen, June 1946. Imprint and date; modernists as enemies of Nazism yet close to its mania for order.
Carter, Sebastian, "Jan Tschichold, Master Typographer", Design Observer, 29 July 2009, first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 2009. The move away from modernism beginning thirty years before Sabon; the continued traditional work for Insel-Verlag; the Penguin method; the ten common mistakes in book production. designobserver.com/jan-tschichold-master-typographer/
McClellan, Martin, "Tschichold, Nazis and Allen Lane: The Modernist Politics of Type", McSweeney's Internet Tendency, 27 January 2010. Quotations from Die neue Typographie on ornamented types and on Fraktur; the March 1933 arrest and six weeks' detention; the 1946 remark on the Third Reich and technical progress; "I am the most severe critic of the young Tschichold". mcsweeneys.net/articles/tschichold-nazis-and-allen-lane-the-modernist-politics-of-type
Studio International, review of "Jan Tschichold and the New Typography", Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, 14 February to 7 July 2019, curated by Anne Blood. The 1928 publisher, his age at publication, the book's practical scope, and four weeks in prison. www.studiointernational.com/index.php/jan-tschichold-and-the-new-typography-review-bard-graduate-center-gallery
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jan Tschichold". Dates; the 1928 handbook for printers and compositors; the cultural Bolshevik charge; his later view that some absolute rules of modern typography were too close in spirit to fascism, and his return to more traditional typefaces and layouts; Penguin 1947 to 1949; The Form of the Book, 1975. britannica.com/biography/Jan-Tschichold
Modernism101, catalogue entry for the 1928 first edition of Die neue Typographie. 240 pages, small quarto, black and red, laid out by the author, first to fifth thousand.
Wikipedia, "Sabon". Designed 1964 to 1967, released jointly by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel in 1967; identical setting by hand, Monotype and Linotype; duplex widths; five per cent narrower than Monotype Garamond; Garamond romans, Granjon italics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabon
Wikipedia, "Hans Schmoller". Born 9 April 1916 Berlin, died 25 September 1985; replaced Tschichold at Penguin in 1949 and headed typography and design there until 1976. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Schmoller
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