Optical Illusions: The Science of Visual Perception (review)

Published for the first time in 1928, sold out a few years later, out of print in German for many decades, available for the Anglophone readership in 1995 (in a facsimile edition by UC Press) and now reprinted with a new foreword, Tschichold's The New Typography is a book of almost mythic dimensions. Considered the modernist era's definitive treatise on typographic design, it offers not only an overview of the principles of commercial and book design but also a historical—and far from ideologically neutral—discussion of "old" (1450-1914) and "new" (since 1914) typography. The book's exceptional fame is due to its own typographic achievement, as well as to its commitment to the politics of modern typography, defined as both the mirror and the condition of a modern social democracy in the machine age. Representing the aesthetic credo of certain aspects of the Bauhaus at a certain moment in its evolution, Tschichold—who had personal but no formal links with the Bauhaus—explains in a very didactic way, and relying upon numerous speaking examples, the necessity of a complete rejection of almost every traditional rule of typography: defending the sans serif font against the serif, asymmetry in page layout against symmetry, the use of photography and its equality with the text against a merely illustrative use of engravings, the valorization of white space against its classic reduction to the margins of the print-block, the diminution of capitals against the ancient orthography, the imperative of standardization against the disarray of artistic freedom, etc. Moreover, all these fundamental shifts, which we no longer notice (for in many cases the revolutionary proposals of the Central European modernists have been widely adopted all over the world and are still taught in many schools of typography and design), are motivated by a series of ideological justifications, which foreground democracy and efficiency, establishing a clear relationship between the former and the latter. In modern society, there is no room left for the divide between the happy few individual artists and the unhappy crowd of consumers. Instead freedom for all is seen as the logical result of the intervention of the engineer, who brings order into chaos and enables all members of society to enjoy a fuller life (the analogy between Tschichold and Le Corbusier is more than symbolic).

The particular status of Tschichold's book, marvelously printed in this edition and a joy to see, read and hold in one's hand, is quite strange, for there are as many reasons to continue to read The New Typography as to consider it a dusty museum piece. In a certain sense, the modernist revolution didactically expounded by Tschichold (who was as much a teacher as a real inventor, despite the great quality of his own work as a designer) has become the victim of its success, and what appeared to be highly innovative in 1928 has become mainstream and formulaic today. Moreover, Tschichold himself gradually turned away from the convictions of his youth, to the extent that at the end of his life he had become a strong supporter of the age-old traditions in book typography, a technological and cultural form that in his eyes had achieved its definitive closure over the centuries. Furthermore, The New Typography is not free of serious flaws: As a handbook, it has proven extremely useful for the reinvention of commercial typography, but on book design, for example, it remained almost completely silent. Finally, Tschichold's ideological plea for rationalization is no longer acceptable for contemporary readers, who have other ideas on the merits of bureaucracy and streamlining.

Yet despite all these problems, The New Typography is a book that can and should retain a strong appeal for a 21st-century readership. First, by crosscutting between technology and culture, politics and theory, artwork and social issues, Tschichold remains a wonderful example of an...