In one issue he ran a story in three conventional columns of type, but rather than reading the traditional way, vertically down, it read horizontally across with each sentence jumping from one column to the next. “Usually, I take my design cue from the story or art,” said Carson, “but this time I just did it to have fun. Once the reader caught on I’m sure they had fun too.” On another page Carson designed the page numbers to be larger than the main headline, a joke in itself, but when the editor changed the order of the pages, he kept the original number on the page because, he explained, “I just happened to like it there.” In the final issue (of a total of six) the page numbers were eliminated and jump-lines simply said “continued.” These hijinks forced the reader to find his or her own way.
Initially, Carson used the newest Emigre typefaces. “I wanted to use whatever was totally new and untried,” he explained. However, he became more dependent on existing typefaces and published a “Special No Emigre Font Issue” (a reference that went over the heads of most surfers). “Emigre faces were becoming like clip art, too identifiable, too dated,” he explained. “Beach Culture was trying to be fresh, and I was using typefaces that were appearing everywhere because they were hip and cool; it was just too easy.”
Carson went further to make design that was difficult for his readers and writers. “In the beginning there were some writers who were real upset that their stories were too hard to read, but I found after a few issues that the very same writers who complained about crazy design were also upset if their article was not given that kind of treatment.” Giving an article his special attention signaled that it was important. By the final issue, Carson had taken this premise to the extreme by obliterating most headlines. Letterforms were overlapped, overprinted, smashed, and otherwise covered by black, mortised, random bands abstracted to the point of incomprehensibility. Carson was designing for the code-busters to make sense of it all.
Dell Mapbacks
Paperback cover art was at its high—or low, depending on your point of view—from the 1940s to early 1950s when a dozen or so New York–based reprint publishers were in fierce competition. Of all of them the Dell Book “look” was the most distinctive. Dell’s innovation was the colorful locator maps that positioned each book in the city, street, house, even room in which the plot developed. The series was referred to as Mapbacks, and for little less than a decade, before the maps were replaced with conventional blurbs, they were among the most popular line of mysteries, thrillers, and romances on the market.
The Dell Publishing Company was founded as a pulp house in 1922 by George Delacorte, Jr., a twenty-eight-year-old who built an amazingly profitable business by publishing pulps, mass market magazines, and comic books. Delacorte was an astute observer of popular trends. Noting the success of Pocket Books he decided to start Dell Books around 1941. By 1943 the first editions were released. To limit his liability and ensure efficient production, he entered into a partnership with Western Printing and Lithographing Company of Racine, Illinois, one of America’s largest commercial printers, whose staff selected titles, created art, and printed Dell Books while Delacorte distributed them.
Dell Books competed successfully because their covers—initially promoting crime stories by Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Michael Shyne, and Brett Halliday, among others—had sexual allure. Although many of the wartime paperbacks used romantic realism to present seductive scenes, Dell used surrealism to suggest racy content. Sex was used, disavowed, and then used again as a marketing tool. The ebb and flow of sexual imagery was nevertheless arbitrary. Rather than using market surveys, the publishers decided on their own about how much was too much. To transcend the saucy and hard-boiled pulp aesthetic perpetuated in Delacorte’s magazine division, Dell’s Racine-based art director, William Strohmer, and his assistant, George Frederiksen (who also painted a number of the covers), turned to expressionistic art that used dramatic symbolism to suggest the theme or plot. The leading staff artist, Gerald Gregg, had adopted various Dali-esque conceits—fragmented body parts and floating objects—which he rendered in airbrush. His distinctive symbolic style was enhanced by the airbrush’s smooth, continuous tones and the artist’s preference for bright colors.
A lot of the lettering in the 1940s paperbacks resembled splash panels of comic books. Dell’s lettering, exclusively hand drawn by Bernie Salbreiter, owes more to movie titles. In Paperbacks, U.S.A.: A Graphic History, 1939–1959 (Blue Dolphin Enterprises, 1981), Piet Schreuders writes that in popular culture paperbacks fit somewhere between the comics and B-movies: “American paperbacks have had a close relationship with the Hollywood film … the film noir and the psychological thriller.” Gregg’s cover art for Crime for a Lady, a back view of a tiny trench-coated man whispering into an oversized woman’s ear, is a comic book cliché reminiscent of B-movie posters from the 1930s and 1940s.
Dell’s covers were sometimes crude and often simple. The simplicity of their imagery may have had something to do with the fact that most Dell artists never read the manuscripts. They were given titles and an oral summary of the contents, a process that was bound to result in a reliance on clichés. Although the cover concepts were based on summaries, the back covers, Dell’s exclusive “cartographic fantasies” required a close reading to determine what part of the plot would be depicted and then rendered (almost exclusively) by Dell’s in-house map-maker, Ruth Belew. Dell used maps as a standard feature from 1943 to 1951. They were based on the scene-of-the-crime diagrams found in tabloid newspapers.
The style that distinguished Dell Books for less than a decade ended around 1951 when the art department moved from Racine to New York. Romantic realism was prevailing in illustration, especially for magazines, and Dell’s New York art director, Walter Brooks, championed the sexy realism of Robert Stanley, one of Dell’s leading realist artists. He modernized the overall look by adopting sans-serif lettering and replacing maps with blurbs. These changes did not hinder sales, but they ended a special era in posterlike paperback art.
TYPE
Blackletter
Lettering is an active and vitally needful civilizing factor and must from henceforth play a much greater part in our life… . It will help to vitalize individual capacities and hence further the development of the whole of our future civilization,” proclaimed a 1936 editorial titled “Writing and Lettering in the Service of the New State” in Die Zeitgemässe Schrift, a magazine devoted to students of lettering and calligraphy. The state was the Third Reich and the lettering was Fraktur, the traditional German blackletter that had lost favor during the Weimar Republic years when the New Typography challenged its dominance. Yet by 1933 the Nazis, who assailed modern sans serif type as “Judenlettern,” brought Fraktur back with a vengeance. Such was the influence of Adolf Hitler over every aspect of German life that lettering and typography were harshly scrutinized by party ideologues.
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister for propaganda and enlightenment, initially decreed that blackletter be returned to its rightful place representing German Kultur. So in the early years of the Reich, blackletter became the official Volksschrift (lettering of the German people). However, they who decreeth also taketh away. After registering complaints about Fraktur’s illegibility (purportedly from Luftwaffe pilots who could not read tail markings), Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, forbade the use of Fraktur in 1941 and ordered all official documents and schoolbooks to be reprinted. Overnight, blackletter became “Judenlettern,” and roman type made a triumphant return. Although blackletter continues to evoke the spirit of Nazi authoritarianism, this summary fall from grace only adds to the historical confusion.
Blackletter, as Paul Shaw and Peter Bain state in the introduction to their catalog for the exhibition Blackletter: Type and National Identity (the Cooper Union, April 1998), is shrouded in mystery, mystique, and nationalism. The polar opposite of the geometrically based roman, blackletter, they explain, “is often misleadingly referred to as Old English or gothic [and] is an all-enco
mpassing term used to describe the scripts of the Middle Ages in which the darkness of the characters overpowers the whiteness of the page.” It is based on the liturgical scripts found in Gutenberg’s 1455 Mainz Bible and precedes Nicolas Jenson’s earliest roman alphabet by fifteen years. Blackletter developed throughout Germanspeaking Europe during the fifteenth century in four basic styles: textura (gotisch), rotunda (rundgotisch), schwabacher, and Fraktur. It has been reinterpreted in various manifestations and styles. The essays and time lines that comprise Shaw and Bain’s catalog trace the dialectic between blackletter and roman and set the stage for the even more fascinating ideological issues inherent in the history of the type form.
Blackletter was always much more than an alphabetic system. The most illuminating essay in Blackletter, Hans Peter Willberg’s “Fraktur and Nationalism” offers a vivid narrative of blackletter’s ideological development. Prior to the Napoleonic wars, for example, tensions between the German states and France inflamed virulent nationalism, which encouraged official recognition of Fraktur as the German type, bestowing upon it the same passionate allegiance as a national flag. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, blackletter symbolized the best and worst attributes of the German states and nation. In the 1920s Jan Tschichold (a leftist who briefly changed his name to Ivan in solidarity with the Bolsheviks) denounced “broken type” as nationalistic, while Rudolf Koch, who also designed the sans serif Kabel as well as his own version of Fraktur, supported, to quote Willberg, “the ‘German Way of Being,’ which manifested itself in the ‘German Way of Writing.’” Other considerations, such as rationalism versus romanticism, later entered the debate for and against blackletter. The German left used Fraktur almost as much as the right, yet the type has been criticized most for being “Nazi-letters.”
Given the negative perception of blackletter, one might presume that, after the Nazis’ defeat in 1945, the type would have forever fallen into disrepute. But, as Yvonne Schemer-Scheddin explains in her essay, “Broken Images: Blackletter between Faith and Mysticism,” an astute analysis of past and present usage, the type was retained by those businesses for whom conservative or traditional values could best be symbolized through Fraktur (including those in the fields of gastronomy and beer production as well as newspapers, for their mastheads) and as a fetish for those loyal to neo-Nazi ideologies. Since German federal law forbids any display of the swastika, blackletter continues to serve a ritualistic and symbolic role for extremists. At the same time, not all blackletter revivals are the property of skins or neo-fascists. Contemporary typographers from Jonathan Barnbrook, to Zuzana Licko, to Michael Worthington have reinterpreted blackletter in a variety of ways, and their quirky alphabets adorn gothic novels, heavy metal CDs, and countless magazine and television advertisements for hip products. Probably most young designers have not even considered the ramifications of blackletter. Despite its ancient history, does blackletter’s short stint as the face of evil shroud or inhibit its continued application? Indeed, this type, and type in general, is not just a vessel but a catalyst of meaning, message, and ideology, and as such, it poses questions still unanswered.
Bauhaus and the New Typography
Walter Gropius, founder of the Staatliches Bauhaus—the state-funded school of arts and crafts—in Weimar, Germany, began his revolutionary school “not to propagate any style, system, dogma, formula, or vogue, but simply to exert a revitalizing influence on design.” The Bauhaus was born in 1919. Germany had just lost a devastating world war. A fragile new republic had been established with its constituent assembly in Weimar, but despite the hopes of the Weimar Republic, the nation was in economic turmoil.
The Bauhaus derived its strength from the social ferment, but ultimately suffered from the relentlessly belligerent political environment. For the Bauhaus to have been closed down only months after the Nazis came to power in 1933 suggests that it was a radical political institution at odds not only with German tradition, but also with Adolf Hitler’s nationalist ideology. In fact, though the Bauhaus was built as a “Cathedral of Socialism” on a foundation that included Marxist theories about art and industry, politics per se was not primary.
The Bauhaus was established to help save the German economy by preparing a new generation of artists and artisans to deal effectively with the increasing demands of industrialization and its profound impact on society and culture. Gropius and his Bauhaus faculty sought to end the designer/craftsman’s “alienation” from labor, and were dedicated to the concept of the “unified work of art—the great structure, bringing together the artist, producer, and consumer in holy union.”
At the outset the Bauhaus resolved to reform society through education. It would democratize art by removing the distinction between “fine” and “applied” art, and by making art responsive to people’s needs. The earliest Bauhaus manifesto offered a program that was, however, difficult to maintain given the complexities of German life. Plagued by outside critics and internal dissent, this so-called spiritual stage of the Bauhaus lasted only until 1923, replaced during its second phase (1923–1925) by new teaching methods based on quasi-scientific ideas and a machine age ethic. The third phase began when, in 1925 (continuing roughly until 1928), the Weimar government withdrew financial support, forcing the school to relocate to Dessau. It was there that Gropius built his Bauhaus school building—a monument to functionalism in which outward visual form is organically related to its internal function. It was in Dessau, too, that the workshop was transformed into a kind of laboratory program, and where, during a short spurt of economic growth, the school, having tailored its teachings to the demands of industry, developed products that rightfully represented a Bauhaus style. In 1928 Gropius retired leaving the Bauhaus to Hannes Meyer (a devout socialist) who was removed in 1931. The directorship next went to Mies Van der Rohe, who moved the school one more time before its permanent closing to an old telephone factory in Berlin.
Before its demise the Bauhaus was one of the most influential design institutions in the world in the fields of architecture, furniture, fixtures, textiles, scenic design, typography, and advertising. Its students were taught to think of themselves not as divorced from society, but as integral to it. Typographers, for example, were not aesthetic specialists nor service-oriented craftspersons, but practitioners of communications open to all possibilities—from abstract to conventional materials.
The Bauhaus typography workshop contributed ideas collected under the banner of the New Typography, the movement of progressive typographers and advertising artists who rebelled against antiquated tenets of design. This was a philosophy, not a style, based on the dictum that “form follows function,” in which typography became a virtual machine for communication. The modern movement of the 1920s, though a rebellious one, reconciled contemporary and classical values by rejecting timeworn verities in favor of timeless utility. Functionalism was the hallmark of Bauhaus typography.
For decades, a tension has existed in typography between rationalism and expressionism, or rather objective versus subjective aesthetics. Jan Tschichold, who helped codify the New Typography in 1925 and eventually returned to traditional methods, wrote in his decidedly conservative The Form of the Book: “The aim of typography must not be expression, least of all self-expression… . In a masterpiece of typography, the artist’s signature has been eliminated. What some may praise as personal styles are in reality small and empty peculiarities, frequently damaging, that masquerade as innovations.” Yet despite this admonition, Tschichold was the chief proselytizer for a movement that attacked visual redundancy that was the byproduct of traditionalism. His doctrine of asymmetry literally stood type on its ear in an effort to garner greater attention. His predilection for sans-serif over serif faces was based on what he and other modernists believed were objective truths. Yet critics accused them of perpetrating myths to support their assertions of legibility. Perhaps the Dutch typographer Gerard Unger is correct, writing in Emigre #23, “Tschichold�
�s preference for sans-serifs … was based upon emotional considerations.”
The Bauhaus and the New Typography busted the conventions of placement and layout and eliminated ornament and symmetrical composition. In place of the classical page appeared “constructed” sans-serif typefaces and bold black and red rules designed to fragment the page and control the eye. During the 1920s the New Typography was viewed as an extraordinary departure from commonplace design. Ultimately, though, even it became yet another set of rules against which to rebel.
Type as Agent of Power
Teeth are an agent of power in man,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, his brilliant discourse on the pathology of “packs” and crowds.
“Teeth are emphatically visual in their lineal order,” explained Marshall McLuhan in the essay titled “The Written Word” in Understanding Media. “Letters are not only like teeth visually,” he continued, “but their power to put teeth into the business of empire building is manifest in our Western history.”
Design Literacy Page 13
