The Birds · 30 January 2003
In 1945, so the story goes, Allen Lane, publisher of Penguin Books, travelled to Basel to try to convince the great designer and scholar Jan Tschichold to come to London and become Penguin’s typography director.
Penguin paperbacks at the time were, in the main, a great sales success (and for that matter a great idea) but were also, in the main, typographically gruesome. With no design standards, Penguins were usually typeset by whoever printed them; often design decisions were made at the whim of the compositor, using whatever was at hand, or, worse yet, in the dreamless eyes of the freelance Art Director.
(In books as elsewhere, the practicalities of jobbing work out with an eye toward the bottom line will inevitably shortchange the customer, pardon me, the reader, on quality – that is if you believe as I do that finding quality in design is a largely practical evaluation – and indeed it speaks to a shadowed if undeniable indifference to the items one trots out to market.)
So Tschichold came to London in 1946 and undertook the massive job of deciding, and then announcing, and then enforcing, this is how it is to be. Printers and typesetters howled, but the guidelines were brilliant: strict where necessary and flexible where not, the sum was both serene and lively and above all at the service of the reader.
The standards took hold, and for decades, give or take a few sizeable wrong turns, Penguin books looked great: not only portable and made to be held in human hands, but lucidly readable, instantly identifiable and unmistakably Penguin.
If ever there was an object lesson for ye somewhat mighty producers of cultural commodities, it is right there in Allen Lane’s decision to find someone who genuinely and obsessively knew what he was doing (as opposed, say, to someone who talked flash crap) award him total authority, and then keep capable people close at hand to follow the lead, indefinitely.
Two days ago, the typesetting staff of Penguin Books Ltd, London, were informed of the company’s intention to make their positions redundant.
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