We are working on a book, with the title Isotype, which will provide an extensive and detailed history of the work in graphic communication produced under the direction of Otto Neurath. This is a collection of freshly written and fully illustrated essays, supplemented by documents published for the first time in English translation or in transcription. The full extent of Isotype work is covered, from 1925 in Vienna, through the years in The Hague (1934–40), to the period in England up to the closure of production in 1971. The book contains discussion of the beginnings of the work in Vienna, its ‘graphic language’, and its connections with artistic production of that time. There are accounts of the uses to which Isotype was put in the USSR, in the USA, and in Africa. Isotype in film and in children’s books are considered in other contributions. Authors of these essays are Benjamin Benus, Christopher Burke, Hisayasu Ihara, Eric Kindel, Robin Kinross, Emma Minns, and Sue Walker.

This book review was written for the Designgeschiedenis Nederland website. It is published here in slightly adapted form, as a follow-up to an earlier review of publications about Isotype.

A short report, with the introductory remarks by Robin Kinross and Eric Kindel, and Christopher Burke’s more substantial exposition of the making of our edition, can now be found on the ‘Isotype revisited’ website.

On Thursday 20 January, thanks to the kind hospitality of the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, we are launching From hieroglyphics to Isotype. The ACF in Knightsbridge is a short walk away from the Victoria & Albert Museum, where, until 13 March, you can see the splendid exhibition Isotype: International Picture Language. This show makes an excellent introduction to Isotype; also a substantial one, illustrated and embodied in a good sample of material from the Isotype archive at the University of Reading.

In December an exhibition presenting the history of Isotype opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The show is largely based on material from the Isotype Collection at the University of Reading and is one issue of the Isotype Revisited project there. Our edition of Otto Neurath’s ‘visual autobiography’ is another.

Copies of Otto Neurath’s ‘visual autobiography’ arrived in London a few days ago. The book has been designed and its pages made by one of its editors, Christopher Burke; it was printed by Die Keure in Bruges and bound by SVK Boekbinderij, also in Belgium. Unusually for us, the book is a cloth-covered hardback, with a loose jacket. We felt that we should give this degree of permanence to the first full publication of Neurath’s text. Three different papers are used in the book, to distinguish and support the three main sections: the introductory material, Neurath’s text, and an appendix that shows a sample of his extraordinary collection of visual material. The book goes on sale in Europe at the end of this month. Copies are now just starting their journey by ship to our distributors in North America.

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.)

The ‘Isotype revisited’ research project at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, has now launched its website.

This week we received copies of Modern typography in Britain: a very packed and rich set of discussions, which will surely come to define its still too little comprehended subject. The book is at the same time Typography papers 8, and continues Typography papers’s work of publishing fully serious, lively and comprehensible articles.

We now have copies of this book, which this month goes on sale generally in the UK, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe. It is of course also for sale from our website. Those in North America – to whom we can’t sell from the website – will need to wait at least a couple of months before the books reach our distributor’s warehouse there. The book joins the Hyphen small-format paperback series: this one comes with flaps and an Otabind binding.

From 2 to 3 April the Information Design Association in the UK is holding a two-day conference at the University of Greenwich, London – admirers of Christopher Wren’s work will have good reasons to go and then get distracted.

On 24 October, Christopher Burke is speaking, in a Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies Seminar, on ‘Otto and Marie Neurath in Exile’.

The recent flourish of interest in the visual work of Otto Neurath – let’s call it Isotype – may be seen as a second wave, coming after a first period of discovery, which included exhibitions of the work in Reading (1975) and Vienna (1982), and an exhibition of the work of the Neurath group’s main artist, Gerd Arntz, in The Hague (1976). From this writer’s point of view, this phase of research culminated in a collection of all Neurath’s writings on the matter (1991).[1] Significant contributions of the second wave include the book Bildersprache by Frank Hartmann and Erwin K. Bauer (2002), an exhibition shown in Brno, Prague, Vienna and finally at the Triennale in Milan (2002–3), and now (2008) the book Otto Neurath: the language of the global polis by Nader Vossoughian, with an associated exhibition and events at the Stroom gallery in The Hague. This book and exhibition have indeed been part of a veritable stream of happenings in the Netherlands, which includes a website of Gerd Arntz’s graphic work and a book Lovely language. Hyphen Press is due to contribute to this second wave later this year, with a book titled The transformer. By way of a warm-up for that book, and some clearing of the ground, here are a few thoughts prompted by the most recent publications.

A symposium on Otto Neurath and the after-effects of his visual work (Isotype) will be held on 31 October at Stroom Den Haag. Among those speaking are Frank Hartmann, Robin Kinross, Kristóf Nyíri, and Femke Snelting.

This interview was recorded in London on 28 May 1999, and published in Slovenian translation in the cultural magazine Emzin (vol. 9, nos. 1–2). In making this transcription, we have made some clarifications and expansions of what was said.