JAN TSCHICHOLD | A Titan Of Typography

The man who perfected Penguin’s classic paperback deserves to be remembered as one of the great designers of the 20th century

Jan Tschichold was an avant-garde German typographer in the 1920s. He is most remembered in Britain for his postwar refashioning of Penguin paperbacks, with their famous, horizontally banded covers – orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography. 

The son of a signwriter, his first career was as a calligrapher for advertisements. His home town of Leipzig was the center of the German book trade, and he was naturally drawn into the world of print. When the Bauhaus, a school of arts and crafts opened its doors for a public exhibition in 1923, Tschichold came away from the Bauhaus exhibition “in a state of great agitation”. Soon he was the chief propagandist for the new movement in typography, and his first major work, The New Typography, was published in 1928.

The book set out a series of stern foundational principles for good design: the use of sans-serif fonts, standardized paper sizes, photographs rather than drawn illustrations, asymmetrical rather than centered layouts. Partly as a result of Mondrian’s influence, abstract art came to play a large part in Tschichold’s work. He used geometrical elements and diagonal arrangements, not only in everyday jobbing printing – business cards, letterheads and brochures – but also in a series of cinema posters. Rarely in more than two colors, these designs incorporate small half-tone photographs, never rectangular, but cut-out as circles or silhouettes. The text, often hand-drawn, was always sans-serif. 

Not everyone was impressed: the Nazi party remained deeply suspicious of modernism, regarding it as fundamentally “un-German”, and after Tschichold took up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner (best-known for his design of the modernist typeface Futura), both he and Tschichold were denounced as “cultural Bolshevists”. Only 10 days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold was taken into “protective custody”. The authorities had made it clear that progressive ideas would not be tolerated.

After four weeks in prison, Tschichold and his family soon took refuge in Switzerland. With an established reputation and connections with the School of Arts and Crafts in Basel, Tschichold was soon teaching, designing posters, curating exhibitions and writing on typographic practice and history.

Since leaving Germany books had become Tschichold’s chief interest and, as luck would have it, in 1946 the founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, was looking for someone to professionalize the company’s design and production. After consulting one of England’s typographer-printers, Oliver Simon, a German-speaking admirer, Lane and Simon went to meet Tschichold in Basel. In March 1947, Penguin had a new designer.

Allen Lane noted that “nothing compared to storm when Jan Tschichold arrived. Mild-mannered man with an inflexible character with screams heard from Edinburgh to Ipswich.” This was the result of Tschichold’s immediate effort to raise the standard of undisciplined English typesetting; to his frustration, Tschichold found himself obliged to treat the compositor not as a craftsman but as a machine, by specifying precise measurements for the spaces between each combination of letters in a title. It was the only way to get the results he desired.

As well as demanding more from his printers, Tschichold tidied up the horizontally banded covers of the standard Penguins and refined the Penguin emblem. The small hardback King Penguins followed the elegant format of the Insel books: the cover with white, bordered titling label centered on a color or patterned background, the inside pages laid out with impeccable and traditionally detailed typography. This style, which he had already employed on similar books for the Basel publisher Birkhäuser, was repeated on music scores, the Reference Library series, on Penguin Handbooks and poetry titles.

One English achievement that he respected was the quality of typeface designs available for machine typesetting. For the covers of the main series, Tschichold retained Eric Gill’s elegant, clean fonts Gill Bold and Gill Sans. And the way a book opened, how comfortable it felt in the hand, were as much Tschichold’s concern as the details of its typography. He considered the weight and grain-direction of paper, stiffness or flexibility of cover boards, and binding. After the wartime restrictions on paper were lifted, Tschichold was able to replace the greyish stock with something more cream-tinted.

Each phase of Tschichold’s career has had a lasting influence. The early work of uncompromising modernism which brought together different strands of the Modern movement has been much imitated for its bravura. The theoretical pronouncements of his early period in Switzerland – of how to space letters and words, of what typefaces to mix – are rules which are still followed. His examinations of book proportions and critical histories of lettering and typefaces, and the elegance of his book design, are on the shelves in advertising agencies and design studios. And his Penguin rules are now available, adjusted for the web.