What an interesting bit of reading I did last night! Just before putting head to pillow I cracked open one of my favorite books of late, Designing books: practice and theory, by Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross (London: Hyphen Press, 1996).

Without quoting too many whole, long passages, let me just say that they were speaking about Jan Tschichold’s “New Typography.” Not so new, as this goes back to 1933. Tschichold was branded a “cultural Bolshevist” and fired “from his position at the Meisterschule in Munich on account of his practice of the New Typography.” This “New Typography,” emphasized clean, functional, and utilitarian typesetting. The traditional form of typesetting to that point, on the other hand, was ruled by ornamentalism and decorative excesses. The beauty of type and layouts took center stage.

I remember, as a kid, that old books with Gothic typefaces mystified me. I found them illegible. Perhaps that turned me, even at a young age, to all things designed sparingly, and to the beauty of functionalism.

In Tscichold’s case, though, the authors relate, came a reversal in the late ’30s, when he turned “to the traditional, mainly axial-symmetrical typography.”

    in left-wing Basel circles it was put about that Tchichold was preparing his return to Nazi Germany. It is as simple as that: asymmetry = cultural Bolshevism; symmetry = National Socialism.

As fantastic a leap as I find that, there comes even a reversal in this. Twenty years later, something new is published, a booklet—the title, translated to English was Realistic book art in the German Democratic Republic. This was in 1953, coincidentally the year I was born. I can only quote again, as I cannot say it any better myself:

    In this we can read not only of inappropriate and inelegant asymmetry, of the shattering of forms, incompetence and amateurishness, of the class character of formalism, and of the stereotyped, intellectualistic typography since the decline of capitalism.

Now get this: asymmetric typography has gone from being representative of cultural Bolshevism, from which I strip out the Nazi overtones of the time and place in which this take on the subject originated, leaving as the meaning embodiment of an egalitarian, inclusive sort to being representative of capitalism.

I disagree that cultural Bolshevism and capitalism are necessarily two “diametrically opposed ideologies,” as Hochuli and Kinross postulate, but they certainly are not identical ideologies.

And it amazes me that, within the space of twenty years, the same idea can be run up divergent flagpoles, is all I’m saying.

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