The exchanges in 1946 between Max Bill and Jan Tschichold never go away. They combined typography, aesthetics, morality, politics, at a level of seriousness that is rare in any such debate between designers. (In a one sentence summary: Bill accused Tschichold of now practising a reactionary typography, with dangerous political echoes; Tschichold considered Bill’s typography to be artistic in a bad sense, and with a false respect for industrial production.) Recently, revising a text that I had written in the 1990s about the conditions for design in Europe after 1945, I had to check its publishing details again.
My first awareness of the debate came in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate studying typography at Reading. In our final year (1974–5, in my case) we had to write a dissertation on a topic of our choice. I had become preoccupied with the work of Jan Tschichold, and was teaching myself German so that I could read his writings at their sources. My first idea was to write about Tschichold’s influence in Britain – a reasonable topic, with clear outlines. But as I went on in my research, things got complicated. I discovered the Bill–Tschichold debate. Also I had met Anthony Froshaug and had fallen under his spell. Froshaug was a prime player in my study, and I brought him into my dissertation as almost an equal figure alongside the other two.
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This was a time of economic and political crisis in Britain, especially in the turmoil of the OAPEC oil-price rises of October 1973. The coal miners went on strike, and, to conserve energy supplies, the government ordered the ‘three-day week’. In the Christmas holidays of 1973, I worked in a London design office heated by camping stoves and lit by candles. The election of February 1974 saw the Conservatives losing power, a hung parliament, and a minority Labour party government. There was a further election in October. Within a generally still comfortable western Europe, some of us felt echoes of the conditions of 1945; we started to live an ecologically conscious life. The urgency of debate between Bill and Tschichold was something I could understand. At the close of my dissertation I wrote: ‘It is too easy and too wishful to conclude that the end of consumer society and the coming scarcity will ensure the final reinstatement of the functional approach. Even a discussion that has tried to respect new typography’s social purpose should, at this stage of events, stop short of such a conclusion.’
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I was able to read ‘Glaube und Wirklichkeit’, Tschichold’s response to Max Bill, in the St Bride Library copy of the Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen, and ordered a photocopy of it (made on the library’s spirit duplicator machine).
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But I wasn’t able to read the text of Max Bill that had prompted Tschichold’s article. That issue of the SGM was missing from St Bride’s run of the periodical. In March 1975, with the boldness or naivety that may be characteristic of students, I wrote to the person who was still editing the periodical (which had long since been incorporated into the Typografische Monatsblätter) – Rudolf Hostettler. Hostettler promptly sent me a copy of Bill’s ‘Über Typografie’. I took this document to have been just an offprint from the magazine – perhaps a rare surviving offprint. But in the literature of the debate, ‘Über Typografie’ is described as a ‘Sonderdruck’. The pages were designed by Max Bill, and printed on a coated paper, where the bulk of the journal used uncoated paper.
The Sonderdruck ‘Über Typografie’ has no date or issue number on it. At 310 x 220 mm, it is larger than the A4 pages of the SGM, though it carries the page numbers (193–200) of whichever issue of the journal it appeared in. In the bottom left corner of its first page is printed a code: os 111.225:311.42.
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I showed this precious thing to James Mosley, the St Bride librarian, who understood that I was donating it to the library. That wasn’t my intention. But before I could explain, he had written the title on the envelope and presumably would have added it to the accessions pile. I reclaimed the document and still have it.
In Tschichold’s reply to Bill, published in the issue for June (1946/6), he refers to Bill’s piece as appearing ‘im vorigen Heft’ – in the previous issue. However, in my dissertation I gave the date as April, not May. The discussion was at that time hardly known and there was no literature on it that I knew of. I had just bought (second-hand, for £2.50, in Zwemmer’s bookshop in London) a copy of Tomás Maldonado’s monograph on Bill, published in Buenos Aires in 1955. There, in the very full bibliography, the date of ‘Über Typografie’ is given as ‘marzo 1946’ – March 1946.
I had also bought a second-hand copy of Margit Staber’s small monograph, Max Bill (St Gallen: Erker Verlag, 1971), which gives the issue number for the publication for ‘Über Typografie’ as ‘4’.
So perhaps that was my source. I used to imagine that a May publication wouldn’t have given Tschichold time to prepare a full-blown and very considered reply such as ‘Glaube und Wirklichkeit’, so an April publication would have seemed more likely.
I carried on with ‘April 1946’ for ‘Über Typografie’ when I discussed the debate in my book Modern typography. That is the date given in the first (1992) and second (2004) editions. In the lengthy introduction that I contributed to the University of California Press’s English translation of Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie (1995), I used ‘April 1946’ too.
Meanwhile Chris Burke in his postgraduate research on Paul Renner had seen that the debate had been extended. Renner had published his own characteristically wise and balanced thoughts on Bill–Tschichold in his article ‘Über moderne Typographie’, published in the March 1948 issue of the SGM. In 1998 Chris published a development of his University of Reading PhD thesis with Hyphen Press, as Paul Renner: the art of typography. In his text, perhaps under my influence, he referred to ‘(t)he dispute between Tschichold and Max Bill that took place in the April and June issues of Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen’. Yet in his bibliography he gave the Bill article as ‘Jhg 65, Heft 5’, so May 1946.
Another researcher in the field got in touch: Gerd Fleischmann. In 1997 he was in London, where he gave me a copy of another Sonderdruck: the issue of Typografische Monatsblätter for 1997/4 devoted to Max Bill’s work as a typographer and graphic designer, published on the occasion of an exhibition of this work in Bielefeld (where Gerd was teaching). In this publication, the issue number of ‘Über Typografie’ is given as 1946/4. I showed him my as yet unpublished English translation of Bill’s text, of which he largely approved. We didn’t discuss the question of the issue number.
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Then in 1999, Gerd Fleischmann, together with Hans Rudolf Bosshard and Christoph Bignens, contributed to a large and splendid book: Max Bill: Typografie, Reklame, Buchgestaltung (Sulgen: Niggli). In the bibliography, ‘1946/4’ was maintained.
The next year, 2000, Chris Burke and I made the effort to present the debate comprehensively, giving the texts by Bill, Tschichold, and Renner in both the original German and in English translations, with our own commentaries. This was published in Typography papers 4 (2000). In my summary of the bibliography of the debate I wrote confidently: ‘One should note first that Max Bill’s “Über Typografie” was published first in the April 1946 issue of the Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen, with Jan Tschichold’s “Glaube und Wirklichkeit” following in the issue of June 1946. In several of the comments on and references to the debate, it is assumed that Bill’s article appeared in the May issue. This mistake is understandable, given Tschichold’s opening reference to Bill’s article “im vorigen Heft” [“in the previous issue”]. No doubt when Tschichold was writing his reply, he was addressing Bill’s article “in the previous issue”. But evidently the wheels of publication of his text did not move so quickly.’
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After this Chris Burke went on to write Active literature, his large work on Tschichold’s New Typography – and still the best single book on Tschichold – published by Hyphen Press in 2007. I was heavily involved as editor and publisher. The Bill–Tschichold debate falls outside the book’s main focus and is mentioned only in its closing pages. In the bibliography, despite my theorizing of seven years earlier in our jointly edited Typography papers collection, Chris gave the date of Bill’s article as ‘Jhg 65, Heft 5’, so May 1946.
After these various publications, Chris Burke and I tended to be involved in queries from editors of further publications. We are both credited with help for a Dutch edition of the debate, Het dispuut tussen Max Bill en Jan Tschichold, published by the Stichting de Roos in 2010. Wim Crouwel, who was helping to organize the publication and who designed it, had got in touch with me. Following our Typography papers publication, this book took up Renner’s essay to make three rather than two documents. The bibliography of this work gives the issue number for ‘Über Typografie’ as May 1946. The editor Steven de Joode remarks on my comments in Typography papers: ‘It is strange that the editors mistakenly but very assertively state that Bill’s article appeared in the April number.’ (My translation of his Dutch.)
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Then in 2012 Hans Rudolf Bosshard published a book on the debate, Max Bill kontra Jan Tschichold: der Typografiestreit der Moderne.1 Bosshard contributed an extended essay on the themes, followed by the texts of Bill and Tschichold. The book concluded with an afterword by Jost Hochuli, who was kind enough to open his considerations by quoting from an email I had written him. Jost had told me the story – which he tells also in this essay – that, late on in their lives, Bill had taken the opportunity of spare time in Berzona (where he was visiting Max Frisch) to visit Tschichold for an hour or so. They sat in the garden drinking wine. I find this delightful evidence that bitter arguments may not be for ever.
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These bibliographical worries came towards a resolution in 2016 when I had a short email correspondence with Jan Boterman, the Dutch graphic designer and writer on typography, especially on composition systems. He was preparing a work on the typography of Max Bill’s essay (in Dutch, for publication in a limited edition) and had done more research than I ever did in the attempt to clear up the question of the month of publication of ‘Über Typografie’. In the Amsterdam University Library he had found Bill’s article in SGM, 1946/5. As a check, he had written to the Swiss National Library. The librarian who replied confirmed that the article appeared in 1946/5 of their holding of SGM; they seemed not to have any Sonderdruck.
Boterman had also been in touch with Hans Rudolf Bosshard, and he relayed Bosshard’s thoughts about the question of April or May for Bill’s publication. These were very similar to mine: Bosshard no longer remembered how he came to think that ‘Über Typografie’ was published in April, he only had a copy of the Sonderdruck, which gives no date; and he also imagined that Tschichold needed more than just a few days to write his reply, so that April made better sense than May.
Final proof, especially for those who don’t ever want to leave their desk, is now available on Felix Wiedler’s blog about books designed by Swiss designers. In entry no. 710 he shows the cover and pages from the May 1946 of Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen. There we see very clearly that ‘Über Typografie’ was published in that issue. As Wiedler notices, it was immediately followed by an article by Tschichold, not only about Schwabacher (blackletter) type, but actually set in a Schwabacher. It was as if Tschichold had set out to provide evidence for Bill’s accusations against him.
Now that we know for sure that it was May and not April, I can put forward my theory more certainly: that the editor of SGM, Rudolf Hostettler, would have sent Tschichold a copy of Bill’s article, perhaps in proof form or perhaps already as the Sonderdruck, well before it was actually published in the May issue. (Later commentators, such as Bosshard and myself, and perhaps also Margit Staber in 1971, worked only from the Sonderdruck, without reference to the SGM publication of ‘Über Typografie’.) So Tschichold would have had at least an extra month to write his reply and let it be published in the June issue.
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Robin Kinross
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Note
- Bosshard’s book was the subject of an extended and very worthwhile review by Maurice Meilleur.