[The Form Of The Book Jan Tschichold Pdf Download
Simone Whitmeyer
The form of the Book offers the harvest of a lifetime's devotion to the art of typography. Its author, Jan Tschichold, influenced the course of fine book design for much of the twentieth century, and his style is now familiar through much of the English-speaking world. The subjects of Tschichold's essays are wide-ranging and include every possible aspect of book design.
(Preface) 'The form of the Book offers the harvest of a lifetime's devotion to the art of typography. Its author, Jan Tschichold, influenced the course of fine book design for much of the twentieth century, and his style is now familiar through much of the English-speaking world. The subjects of Tschichold's essays are wide-ranging and include every possible aspect of book design.'
Standard Postage: Provides limited cover for loss/damage only up to 20GBP. Please select the alternative 'tracked postage' option at checkout for full cover on more valuable items! Excess shipping charges will be reimbursed. Any import charges/taxes, if incurred, to be covered by the buyer.
Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy. In 1919, he began in the class of Hermann Delitzsch a study on the Leipziger Akademie der Knste (Leipzig Academy of the Arts). Due to his extraordinary achievements, he soon became a master pupil of the rector of Walter Tiemann, a type designer with the Gebr.-Klingspor foundry, and was given the task of teaching his fellow students. At the same time, he received the first orders as part of the Leipzig Trade Fair and in 1923 set up his own business as a typographic consultant to a print shop.
This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in architecture or the fine arts. It also may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom typefaces as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock faces on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks.
Although, up to this moment, he had only worked with historical and traditional typography, he radically changed his approach after his first visit to the Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar.[5] After being introduced to important artists such as Lszl Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and others who were carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography. He became sympathetic to this attempt to find new ways of expression and to reach a much more experimental way of working, but at the same time, felt it was important to find a simple and practical approach.
He became one of the most important representatives of the "new typography" and in a special issue of Typographischen Mitteilungen (typographic communications) in 1925 with the title of "Elementare Typografie" (elementary typography), he summarized the new approaches in the form of theses.
After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, they were both denounced as "cultural Bolshevists". Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold's books were seized by the Gestapo "for the protection of the German people".[citation needed] After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933.
Tschichold had converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement mentioned above); then a 1927 personal exhibition; then with his most noted work Die neue Typographie.[8] This book was a manifesto of modern design, in which he condemned all typefaces but sans-serif (called Grotesk in Germany). He also favoured non-centered design (e.g., on title pages), and codified many other Modernist design rules. The idea of the New was the basis for the transformation of the entire system of printed graphics and graphic design.[9] He advocated the use of standardised paper sizes for all printed matter, and made some of the first clear explanations of the effective use of different sizes and weights of type in order to quickly and easily convey information. This book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography, which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany.[10] Yet, despite his visits to England just before the war, only about four articles by Tschichold had been translated into English by 1945.
Although Die neue Typographie remains a classic, Tschichold slowly abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards (e.g. his Saskia typeface of 1932, and his acceptance of classical Roman typefaces for body-type) as he moved back towards Classicism in print design.[11] He later condemned Die neue Typographie as too extreme. He also went so far as to condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic.
His abandonment of Modernist principles meant that, even though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss International Typographic Style. Unimpressed by the use of realist or neo-grotesque typefaces, which he saw as a revival of poorly designed models, his survey of typefaces in advertising deliberately made no mention of such designs, save for a reference to 'survivals from the nineteenth-century which have recently enjoyed a short-lived popularity.'[13]
The canons of page construction are historical reconstructions, based on careful measurement of extant books and what is known of the mathematics and engineering methods of the time, of manuscript-framework methods that may have been used in Medieval- or Renaissance-era book design to divide a page into pleasing proportions. Since their popularization in the 20th century, these canons have influenced modern-day book design in the ways that page proportions, margins and type areas (print spaces) of books are constructed.
The notion of canons, or laws of form, of book page construction was popularized by Jan Tschichold in the mid to late twentieth century, based on the work of J. A. van de Graaf, Ral Rosarivo, Hans Kayser, and others.[1] Tschichold wrote, "Though largely forgotten today, methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve have been developed for centuries. To produce perfect books these rules have to be brought to life and applied." as cited in Hendel 1998, p. 7. Kayser's 1946 Ein harmonikaler Teilungskanon[2][3] had earlier used the term canon in this context.
Typographers and book designers are influenced by these principles to this day in page layout, with variations related to the availability of standardized paper sizes, and the diverse types of commercially printed books.[4]
The Van de Graaf canon is a historical reconstruction of a method that may have been used in book design to divide a page in pleasing proportions.[5] This canon is also known as the "secret canon" used in many medieval manuscripts and incunabula.
The geometrical solution of the construction of Van de Graaf's canon, which works for any page width:height ratio, enables the book designer to position the type area in a specific area of the page. Using the canon, the proportions are maintained while creating pleasing and functional margins of size 1/9 and 2/9 of the page size.[6] The resulting inner margin is one-half of the outer margin, and of proportions 2:3:4:6 (inner:top:outer:bottom) when the page proportion is 2:3 (more generally 1:R:2:2R for page proportion 1:R[7]). This method was discovered by Van de Graaf, and used by Tschichold and other contemporary designers; they speculate that it may be older.[8] The page proportions vary, but most commonly used is the 2:3 proportion. Tschichold writes "For purposes of better comparison I have based his figure on a page proportion of 2:3, which Van de Graaf does not use."[9] In this canon the type area and page size are of same proportions, and the height of the type area equals the page width. This canon was popularized by Jan Tschichold in his book The Form of the Book.[10]
Robert Bringhurst, in his The Elements of Typographic Style, asserts that the proportions that are useful for the shapes of pages are equally useful in shaping and positioning the textblock. This was often the case in medieval books, although later on in the Renaissance, typographers preferred to apply a more polyphonic page in which the proportions of page and textblock would differ.[11]
Ral Rosarivo analyzed Renaissance-era books with the help of a drafting compass and a ruler, and concluded in his Divina proporcin tipogrfica ("Typographical Divine Proportion", first published in 1947) that Gutenberg, Peter Schffer, Nicolaus Jenson and others had applied the golden canon of page construction in their works.[13] According to Rosarivo, his work and assertion that Gutenberg used the "golden number" 2:3, or "secret number" as he called it, to establish the harmonic relationships between the diverse parts of a work,[14] was analyzed by experts at the Gutenberg Museum and re-published in the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, its official magazine.[15]Ros Vicente points out that Rosarivo "demonstrates that Gutenberg had a module different from the well-known one of Luca Pacioli" (the golden ratio).[15]
In figure 5 the height of the type area equals the width of the page: using a page proportion of 2:3, a condition for this canon, we get one-ninth of the paper width for the inner margin, two-ninths for the outer or fore-edge margin, one-ninth of the paper height for the top, and two-ninths for the bottom margin. Type area and paper size are of equal proportions. ... What I uncovered as the canon of the manuscript writers, Raul Rosarivo proved to have been Gutenberg's canon as well. He finds the size and position of the type area by dividing the page diagonal into ninths.[9]
795a8134c1