In the movie, The Usual Suspects, there’s a scene in which it begins to sink in to those of us watching that if Keyser Soze exists, it may only be in Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal’s mind. Spacey steps outside the stationhouse he’s just been questioned in and his torturously twisted body slowly, exquisitely, straightens up.

Apropos of nothing, I reminded myself of that scene the other night. Walking out of the public library favoring my recently broken right leg, I leaned on the cane in my left hand. The leg is healing, but the day had been a long, tiring one and I was dragging. I looked at the book I had gone to pick up, a translation of Jan Tschichold’s 1928 work, The New Typography (Die neue Typographie). Looking at the front cover, I noticed the year the The New Typography had been published originally. I smiled to myself, stood erect and walked to my car without the cane touching the ground.

I anticipated opening the book and starting to read the whole drive home. The little I know about Tschichold’s original stance on a new typography appealed to me: an emphasis on a clean, modern look and away from ornamentation. Having always wondered about the use of Gothic-style type, heavily ornamented but hardly the most legible, I felt sure Tschichold’s writing would illuminate a whole path that led straight to the typography and page design I believe in.

Later, I opened the book to the Introduction, the lead-in to Tschichold’s actual translated text. A number of pages in, I read, “roman as a minimum demand … sanserif as the preferred
choice … ” explaining what I found as the main textface.

… for the purposes of characterizing Tschichold’s preference, “Aksidenz Grotesk” in a light (as opposed to medium or regular) weight is sufficient description. He wanted to show that such a typeface could be easily read in continuous text … despite common belief that serif text is more legible.

I stopped and flipped around, not reading now but simply looking at the typesetting and design. The nicest way I might describe what I saw is “rough”. The last line of a recto page jumped out at me: it ended with a broken word and a hyphen. The last line of a paragraph on another page ended with a broken word. This was the Introduction. And no indents to a paragraph’s first line—throughout, not merely for the first paragraph of a new chapter or section.

I turned to the book”s end, hoping for an explanatory colophon. An endnote began:

    This first  publication of the English-language version of Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typografie (1928) has attempted to follow the author”s original page layouts and design precepts as closely as possible.

I have already read elsewhere that Tschichold later renounced much of his earlier views on a new typography. But is there any chance that the last-quoted line above is an attempt to blame a horrible-looking little book on a dead man who cannot defend himself?