Some previous posts here have offered indirect criticisms of the shop Amazon.[1] Now here is a direct assault on the behemoth, made by a publisher with much mainstream experience, just starting out on a new venture that will work outside the existing book trade and sell direct to customers.

It’s been suggested elsewhere in these web-pages that we can judge the quality of a book by looking at its production as an object for carrying meaning. The space between the lines will tell us something about the quality of thought in the editorial-design processes, and so – because editor and writer might work hand-in-hand – in the writing too; and the glue on the spine will tell us something about the thinking in the publishing house.[1] The recent book of conversations between Lee Konitz and Andy Hamilton may test this thesis to near-destruction.

Some years ago – I recall events and publications in the early 1990s – there was some noise about the ‘designer as author’: graphic designers would have a hand in writing (or maybe ‘authoring’) the texts that they also designed, and designers could even be considered as authors. It follows from the technology: the text gets shaped by designers, and the last touch before publication may now be in a designer’s hands. And there is the fact that content is always embodied in its form, and so to make form is also to shape content. But it does not follow that the designer needs to become an author. I don’t believe we should give up on the ideal of the designer working hand-in-hand with an author: listening, thinking, suggesting possibilities, making changes to first proposals, and often following an author’s wishes. There are clear advantages in a separation of the two roles: designers see things that authors can’t, and vice versa. (Against all this, the arrival of another new technic – screen displays of content – may take this process in another direction: away from the hands of any designer and into the domain of the ‘browser’ and its settings, and of the particular screen that is used.)

Idea magazine is pleasantly print-fixed: none of the words it publishes are put online, so anyone wanting a taste of it simply has to go out and find a copy. The current issue, no. 341, has an article that refers to Hyphen Press and its efforts. This essay, ‘Subterranean modernism’ by Randy Nakamura and Ian Lynam, is perhaps the first published piece by unconnected observers to address ideas that we’ve been busy with for now 30 years. This is very pleasing.[1]

Anthony Froshaug’s article ‘Typography is a grid’, which we posted here in August 2000, has proved to be the most popular page on this website, with numbers boosted recently by a link from a website about grids in typography. One suspects that the meaning of Froshaug’s text eludes many of these visitors (he thought that grids were self-evident and inevitable; not something to make a song and dance about). As a counterweight to – and in part a confirmation of – the ideas in ‘Typography is a grid’, it is worth reading more of what he wrote. The piece given below was written in 1947, but published only in 2000, in the book that gathers all of his writings: Anthony Froshaug: Typography & texts. The social-political dimension, which is always evident in his work, is strikingly present here. And, as Paul Stiff remarks of Froshaug in his very recently published essay ‘Austerity, optimism: modern typography in Britain after the war’ (in the book Modern typography in Britain): ‘what sharpens his praxis is phosphoric writing, better theoretically informed than any contemporary designer’.

Last Thursday the London publisher Libris brought out Erdmut Wizisla’s Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the story of a friendship. This is an English-language edition of the book published originally by Suhrkamp. Behind that edition was a first embodiment, as its author’s doctoral thesis. The translation from thesis to book is a difficult one, and a process that is rarely resolved well. The transmutation of such a complex book from one language into another is also a difficult business. Some of the issues raised by these endeavours have been brought up, also in connection with Walter Benjamin’s writings, in two previous posts here, in August and December of last year.

The typographer Alexander Verberne died on 27 May 2009. After a stroke in 1997, which was followed by further strokes, he had been seriously impaired and was living in a care-home in The Hague. He was born on 18 August 1924 in Den Helder.

This new typeface designed by Fred Smeijers has just been released by OurType. As its name promises, it is an echt-German production: recalling the early-nineteenth-century Grotesk letter.

A recent tidying of the office turned up an offprint from the journal Matrix (no. 21, 2001), which published two pieces written on the occasion of the publication of our book Anthony Froshaug. Looking at them again, they seem worth reviving – to explain something of the process by which that book was made (just as this piece explains how another of our books came into the world).

Further to this discussion of the Benjamin archive book, published in English by Verso, some invaluable notes on the history of the publication of Walter Benjamin’s writings can be found here, as a prelude to the publication next year of Erdmut Wizisla’s Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the story of a friendship, 1924–1940.[1] Let the Verso editorial staff read these notes, and learn.