and
Bodoni. Published in 1932 by the Benno Schwabe & Co. publishing house. Tschichold was the son of a provincial
signwriter, and he was trained in
calligraphy. In 1919, he began in the class of
Hermann Delitzsch a study on the Leipziger Akademie der Künste (Leipzig Academy of the Arts). Due to his extraordinary achievements, he soon became a master pupil of the rector of
Walter Tiemann, a type designer with the
Gebr.-Klingspor foundry, and was given the task of teaching his fellow students. At the same time, he received the first orders as part of the
Leipzig Trade Fair and in 1923 set up his own business as a typographic consultant to a print shop. This
artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in
architecture or the
fine arts. It also may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom typefaces as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock faces on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks. Although, up to this moment, he had only worked with historical and traditional typography, he radically changed his approach after his first visit to the
Bauhaus exhibition at
Weimar. After being introduced to important artists such as
László Moholy-Nagy,
El Lissitzky,
Kurt Schwitters and others who were carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography. He became sympathetic to this attempt to find new ways of expression and to reach a much more experimental way of working, but at the same time, felt it was important to find a simple and practical approach. He became one of the most important representatives of the "new typography" and in a special issue of
Typographischen Mitteilungen (typographic communications) in 1925 with the title of "Elementare Typografie" (elementary typography), he summarized the new approaches in the form of theses. After the election of
Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to
communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of
Paul Renner, they were both denounced as "cultural Bolshevists". Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest,
Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for
Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933. Apart from two longer stays in England in 1937 (at the invitation of the
Penrose Annual), and 1947–1949 (at the invitation of
Ruari McLean, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of
Penguin Books), Tschichold lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life. He died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974. ==Design==