INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
ROBIN KIN ROSS
Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation
between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that
better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious. uni
versal gesture of the book- in leaflets. brochures. articles. and posters.
Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to
machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it;
one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
1928 WA LTER BENJAMIN*Die neue Typographie was published in Berlin in June 1928. The author was
the then twenty-six-year-old German typographer Jan Tschichold. The pub
lishers were the Bildungsverband der Deutschen Buchdrucker: the educa
tional association of the German printing-trade union. The book was the
most detailed and best-illustrated exposition of the New Ty pography. This
was the manifestation in the sphere of printed communication of the mod
ern movement in art. in design, and - at least this was its aspiration - in
life as a whole, which developed in Central Europe between the two world
wars. To take representative or iconic instances, one could mention the
new architecture built for the city of Fran kfurt (under the direction of Ernst
May), the political theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, the tubular
steel furniture of Mart Stam or Marcel Breuer, the cinema of Dziga-Vertov
or Joris Ivens. journals such as iiO or Die Form: work in which formal inno
vation and social concerns were intertwined. The New Ty pography now
falls into place in the constellation of Central European modernist culture.
Tschichold's book remains unsurpassed as the best single document of and
about the New Ty pography. But its context and concerns now need consid
erable explanation.
TSCHICHOLD BEFORE DIE NEUE TYPOGRAPHIE
Jan Tschichold (1902- 1 974) was the son of a Leipzig sign-writer and let
tering artist. 1 His early start in-and lifelong preoccupation with- letter
ing and typography is thus not surprising. Leipzig was one of the centres
for printing and publishing in Germany, and at the heart of the country's
typographic culture. After an informal apprenticeship to his father, he
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