ligatures & loveliness

Buick Sky Hawk V6
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Jan Tschichold was a hard-core typographer in Germany during the first part of the 20th Century. How hard-core? The Nazis sent him to prison for practicing his trade the way he wanted to practice it. He called it “New Typography”. (Actually, he was German, so he called it “Die neue Typographie”. And the imprisonment? There was some noise about Communism too, but that would take longer to blog about.)

I vaguely remember reading something he wrote about ligatures, so I went diving into The Form of the Book to ferret it out to illustrate this image. (Realize it's not a traditional ligature because it unites two words, but it still makes me melt -- the way the descender on the "y" creates the stem for the "H" -- it's so lovely.)

Couldn’t find the passage, but did find this, which I think beautifully sums up the role of the designer – know your craft; make it lovely, useful and good; and then get out of the way. (And yeah, it’s a little bit over the top. But that’s Tschichold.)

Immaculate typography is certainly the most brittle of all the arts. To create a whole from many petrified, disconnected and given parts, to make this whole appear alive and of a piece – only sculpture in stone approaches the unyielding stiffness of perfect typography.

For most people even impeccable typography does not hold any particular aesthetic appeal. In its inaccessibility, it resembles great music. Under the best circumstances, it is gratefully accepted. To remain nameless and without specific appreciation, yet to have been of service to a valuable work and to the small number of visually sensitive readers – this, as a rule, is the only compensation for the long, and indeed never-ending, indenture of the typographer.

Jan Tschichold
The Form of the Book

(Well this is interesting: It appears that my Hartley & Marks paperback copy of The Form of the Book is now out of print and the few that are left are retailing for $100 on Amazon. Nice return on a $22 investment.)