Confusing the Germans

This photograph appeared recently in an Oxford Times supplement, showing workmen removing a road sign from the Godstow Road approach to the Woodstock Road roundabout at the start of the second world war. It’s good to have a reference for the scale of pre-Worboys signs, and also an image which shows the variable character spacing and the rather odd approach to representing a roundabout of this generation of signs.

Jost Hochuli in Reading

Following his talk at St Bride yesterday, to mark the opening of an exhibition of work by St Gallen book designers, Jost Hochuli visited Reading today to see our collections and discuss design with students on our MA programmes. The photographs show Paul Stiff explaining a point about the ‘Designing information for everyday life, 1815–1914’ exhibition; Eric Kindel in the Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection; and MA Book Design student Christina Kuschkowitz presenting her home reference manual, Urban chickens.

It’s Scotland’s apostrophe

The recent sale of railway posters from the collection of Malcolm Guest brought to light this image, guaranteed to raise the ire of any Lynne Truss.

Accidental subversions

I hadn’t come across Clive Richards’s collection of chance encounters with signage before, many of which seem to show a particularly English brand of gentle humour.

By Underground to Southend-on-Sea

From 1910 to 1939, you could take a District Railway train all the way to Southend-on-Sea.* So it’s appropriate that that’s the venue for an exhibition of new takes on Harry Beck’s Underground diagram, featuring work by Maxwell Roberts. Here are the details.

* John Robert Day, John Reed (2005). The story of London's underground (9 ed.). Capital Transport. p. 66.

Preserving the aesthetic without the repression?

Maxim Zhukov, formerly typographic coordinator for the United Nations, contributed this piece to the ATypI forum about nostalgia for the brands and designs of the Soviet era:

‘ “A number of scholars/commentators are talking about the growing nostalgia in Russia for the Soviet era. Old Soviet brands (from cigarettes to canned goods) are being resuscitated; advertisers play on this; a “Soviet-style” theme restaurant has opened in Moscow; etc. As I understand it, similar things are happening in Poland, Slovenia, East Germany, and elsewhere. My concern is with Russia. Do you see this trend for Soviet nostalgia reflected in Russian typography over the past several years?” – Brian Bennett

You are correct. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is certainly there, and has been for quite a while. Whether it is growing, I don’t know. It’s just that it seems to affect – to various degrees – many spheres of life in Russia: political, economic, social, cultural, etc. Since the number of people who remember from their own experience what Soviet life was like is rapidly shrinking, the myths and legends abound; they become more elaborate and fairy-tale-like, often bordering on the extravagant and outrageous.

I am sure that nostalgia takes various forms in Russia and in the former vassal nations of the USSR. There are many reasons for that; I am not going to dwell on them: I am no political scientist. The renewal of the old Soviet brands is indeed highly visible. It is interesting that the ‘name’ brands directly related to the Soviet period, such as Kirov [see also here], Krasnyi Oktiabr', Leningrad, and the like obviously help sales.

One of the best examples is the ever-popular super-fatty ice cream called ‘48 kopecks’ – that was the price of a block in the Soviet times. It now sells for about one hundred times that much: now that’s what I call nostalgia.

Often, Soviet nostalgia comes with a wink. Many members of ATypI, Russian and non-Russian, know of a Soviet-themed restaurant in Moscow called Petrovich. Yes, the standard Soviet fare is served there, with gusto. The restaurant owes its existence to the wicked inspiration of Andrei Bilzho, the creator of a popular cartoon character Petrovich, a clumsy ‘Homo Sovieticus’. One of the most appealing features of that ‘enterprise of public alimentation’ is its unique collection of Soviet cultural artifacts. Petrovich is not the only Soviet-themed restaurant in Russia, but it is the oldest (est. 1997) and is likely to be the best in its class.


The public craving for Soviet-style products naturally calls for matching graphic design. And rest assured that the offer conveniently matches the demand. The typographic tools are there. Many fonts offered by ParaType, the premier Russian digital type foundry, are actually revivals of the Soviet designs (e.g., Bannikova, Kuzanyan, Bazhanov, New Standard, Svetlana, Kudryashev, Kudryashev Sans, Lazurski, Telingater Display, Journal, New Journal, etc.), or of the older, pre-1917 typefaces that were still in use in the Soviet times (e.g., Academy, Black Grotesk, Elizabeth, Literaturnaya, etc.).

Oh, one more link.’

M. Z.

Details of the book illustrated above. The text is set in Literaturnaya, which Maxim reminded me was criticized by Allen Hutt: ‘The survival of this De Vinne-style type, from the worst design period of old Imperial Germany, in the premier Socialist country in the latter part of the twentieth century, is a typographical phenomenon as unique as it is deplorable.’ ‘A revolution in Russian typography’, Penrose Annual,Volume 61, 1968

Lisa Jardine on ebooks

A link to a download of Radio 4’s A Point of View. And the text.

The Form of the Book book

The Form of the Book Book

A collection of essays on book design by
Catherine de Smet
James Goggin
Jenny Eneqvist, Roland Früh & Corina Neuenschwander
Richard Hollis
Sarah Gottlieb
Chrissie Charlton
Armand Mevis

Edited by
Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge

Published by Occasional Papers

The black page

Katherine Gillieson alterted me to this celebration of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy at Shandy Hall: The Black Page

Diurnal obsolescence

What are we to make of the text that Barnes & Noble has chosen to use in the sample pages of its new ebook reader, the Nook. (Nook? As in Rookery Nook? Nookie Bear?) It is a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in particular the city of Leonia. Leonia is the ultimate in consumer wastefulness – every day all its consumer products, both ephemeral and durable, are thrown out, only to be themselves replaced 24 hours later. The detritus surrounds the city like a range of mountains.

Are Barnes & Noble telling us something about the purchasing of books – that we need new ones every day, and should discard the old? Or the the Nook releases us from this fate, as we need not accumulate any physical books at all? Or has some subversive noted that each season will bring a newer, better ebook reader, so that the old ones can be discarded, indestructible, on to the growing waste-dumps of Leonia?

By the way, William Weaver’s translation is correctly ‘light bulbs’, not ‘bulbes’; ‘tubes’, not ‘rubes’, of toothpaste. And I think the strange use of bold and bold italic is supposed to show how you can highlight passages of text.

The text appears to be in a version of Monotype Amasis, but the italic is a sloped roman (we are told it can display five fonts). The Nook has the marketing advantage of being able to show covers from the Banes & Noble online store in colour because, as well as the epaper reading screen, there is a shallow conventional colour screen below.

‘I demand a serial comma!’

I haven’t got hold of a copy yet, but this volume is certainly on my must-read list.

‘Each year readers submit over three thousand grammar and style questions to the Q&A page at The Chicago Manual of Style Online. Some are arcane, some simply hilarious – and one editor, Carol Fisher Saller, reads every single one. All too often she notes a classic author–editor standoff over the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of prose styling: ‘This author is giving me a fit’. ‘I wish that I could just DEMAND the use of the serial comma’. ‘My author wants his preface at the end of the book. This seems ridiculous. I mean, it’s not a post-face’. In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller suggests new strategies for keeping the peace. Emphasizing carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, she shows copy editors how to build trust and cooperation. One chapter takes on the difficult author; another speaks to writers directly. Throughout, the focus is on serving the reader, even if it means breaking ‘rules’ along the way.’

Trusting your designer

Matt Carey brought this letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol to my attention – the kind we’d all like to receive!