This review of the book Wim Crouwel: mode en module, by Frederike Huygen and Hugues Boekrad, was written for and published in an issue Typography papers, now out of print.[1] The Crouwel book, as it was often referred to, was issued only in a Dutch edition, which sold out quickly. Since then, Wim Crouwel’s renown has only increased. Most recently his work has been celebrated in a major exhibition (at the Design Museum, London, 2011, and on show from this month at The Lighthouse, Glasgow); in The Hague he has been awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize (2009, with an exhibition following in 2012). Wim Crouwel: mode en module is now something of a fabled work, with large prices asked for second-hand copies. Given the continuing absence of an English-language edition of the book – which would surely be a tough translation, editorial, and production job, as well as an expensive one – this review may be worth resurrecting, as a marker of a moment in the discussion of graphic design. This version of my text is essentially as published in Typography papers, with a few updating remarks added in the notes.

In summer of this year the Royal Festival Hall, on the South Bank of London’s river, was reopened after a major, two-year refurbishment. The auditorium itself was remade and restored, and the rest of the building was significantly remade/restored too. The spirit and the materials of the original building were respected, at the same time changes needed for the place’s new uses were made. The architects leading the work were Allies & Morrison, among the most convincing and least pretentious of the UK firms practising ‘modern architecture’.

The re-publication here of this essay by Gerrit Noordzij is prompted by the issue of Christopher Burke’s Active literature. Our book was made in the belief that the best service to Tschichold is a critical placing of his works and his ideas in their real historical context: the fact that we want to do this in such detail must be evidence of the importance that we think his work has. Gerrit Noordzij’s short and sharply critical essay points to what may be the central issue in Tschichold’s writings, and it does more than that. I read ‘Rule or law’ when it was published in Paul Barnes’s small book of ‘Reflections and reappraisals’ on Jan Tschichold, which he edited and published (under the imprint of Typoscope) in New York in 1995. It stuck out from that book as an unusually serious and illuminating reflection, which took Tschichold as its focus, and in the process tells a large truth about how teaching can happen, and how learning can happen. For its publication here, the text has been a little corrected and updated, in conversation with the author. It certainly merits dissemination now on the World Wide Web. RK

The latest New Left Review leads with a dazzling article by Régis Debray, lamenting the end of print, and of socialism: the one death implies and necessitates the other. Debray discerns three stages of communication history: the logosphere (from the invention of writing to the coming of the printing press; the graphosphere (from 1448 to around 1968); and the videosphere, the realm of the image – which we now inhabit.