Felix Wiedler just informed me about his very interesting blog called Book Design Stories.
This collection is about modernist typographic design in german-language books from 1925 to 1965 (and beyond). why start in 1925? in october 1925 the german printers’ trade magazine “typographische monatsblätter” published a special issue entitled “elementare typographie” (elemental typography), containing manifestos by jan/iwan tschichold, el lissitzky, laszlo moholy-nagy, and others. in the same year tschichold designed his first modernist book for the büchergilde gutenberg (see story 28). these avant-garde typographers created a new “functionalist” style that was influenced by modern architecture and abstract art – especially russian constructivism and dutch de stijl –, and adopted elements of experimental futurist and dada typography. books were no longer to be old-fashioned, leather-bound status symbols for the middle and upper classes, but have a modern, dynamic, machine-age look – which meant: asymmetric layout, no-frills typefaces such as sans-serifs, and “objective” photographs or photomontages.
The index of all the books he talked about is here.
