Jan Tschichold: A Life in Typography
by Ruari McLean, Ellen Lupton, Elaine Lustig Cohen
Category: Design

Looking at the period between 1915 and 1950, Letters from the Avant-Garde is the first book to document the history of modern design and typography through the medium of printed stationery. Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, De Stijl, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and other movements and institutions used letterheads to promote their ideas about form, function, and technology to an international community. The printed letterheads and other ephemera reproduced in this book are typographic self-portraits of some of the most fascinating figures in the development of modernism, including Herbert Bayer, Le Corbusier, El Lissitzky, F. T. Marinetti, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, and Piet Zwart. Letters from the Avant-Garde features over 150 illustrations in full color, many published here for the first time. These experimental letterheads helped originate the modern discipline of design for corporate identity, and they show how avant-garde artists and designers engaged mass media in their work. This unique book will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and theory of modern art, design, and typography.