No. 4, Questions without question marks

[open-reading-group at o-r-g.com]

No. 4, Questions without question marks

An(other) interview with Robin Kinross of Hyphen Press
by Stuart Bailey

--


> I used to say 'typographer', in the days when you had to say what

> you were in your passport. It was a matter of slightly romantic

> allegiance, because I never practised it in the way that most people

> do. I also did a lot of writing, and now I do a lot of editing which

> means, reading other people's writing, and working with texts and

> working with another designer. So I think now I'm an editor, and in

> the Continental sense, or the French sense of 'editeur'. That also

> means 'publisher'. I'm pleased with that idea; it has some of the

> same good qualities as 'typographer'. It's not so much visual

> production as word production. That's what I do.


This is Robin's answer to a question from an earlier interview with Petra
Cerne Oven, originally published in 1999 and currently available on the
Hyphen Press website (http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/column/column_3.html).
Petra framed that piece by pointing out how perfectly the hyphen
represents Robin's practice, both in the senses of carrying-on (the
project of modernist enlightenment) and break-ing (from existing models of
writing and publishing). This new conversation attempts to act in the same
spirit, both continuing and diverging from the previous discussion.

I first met Robin in 1993, somewhere around the middle of my final year at
the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at The University of
Reading, on the same course Robin had completed himself some 20 years
earlier. A few interested students had invited Robin to come and give an
informal afternoon talk, of which my time-bleached memory recalls three
things. The first was an introductory talk loosely concerned with
Locality, beginning with some photographs of a small rural building
somewhere in what we then still thought of as Continental Europe, a
description of how its form and materials were drawn from the area's
history and geography, and ending with a protracted discussion about the
precise typographic alignment of three occurrences of the word
'Architecture' on a Max Bill-designed book cover. This talk was also
memorable for the fact that, against Reading protocol, Robin was both sat
down and, apparently, improvising. The second was a personal mini-epiphany
induced by the contents of a box Robin had brought along: various
publications and ephemera as examples of local principles in contemporary
printed matter, mostly Dutch, and approximately half of which were back
issues of the maverick architectural journal Oase [Oasis], designed by the
then relatively uncelebrated Karel Martens. The third was an absurdly
overheated discussion about the design of two wine glasses placed in
proximity to Robin towards the end of the proceedings. In the closing
sequence a forgotten member of the audience is demanding -- with more
irritation than seemed strictly necessary -- 'what do you mean one is
obviously better than the other? Which one!?', and Robin duly raising the
one that was obviously better than the other, at which point things
started to make a certain sense to me. In retrospect this was my
unofficial personal prologue to Robin's first major work Modern
Typography, which he had self-published a couple of years beforehand.


> It's quite a strange book. It was the ideal book for me, at that

> time. It had flaps on the cover, and it was printed letterpress. I

> think of it as 'the last letterpress book'. The printer went out of

> business soon after it was done. It was like leaving the sinking ship

> of that technics: everything was going down, but, well, we produced

> this book.


SB
In Modern Typography you describe a social watershed around 1973 related
to the global oil crisis, and in your interview with Petra, another in
1989 related to the dismantling of the Berlin wall. In the seven years
since that interview I guess it's hard to deny another watershed in 2001
related to terrorism. Can you say something about how you perceive the
changes during each of these periods has affected your publishing or other
activities?

RK
My idea about the Zeitgeist, and the way in which we see 'periods' as
starting and finishing, is that it is something that you tend to construct
after the event. Yet, events like the oil-price crisis of 1973, or the
fall of Communism in the autumn of 1989 and in the months following, and
now 9/11, did all come with the sense of a powerful shock. You feel that
you are living in history, whereas for the rest of your life, it's just
days going by and getting on with your own immediate, personal concerns.
But in those days of historical crisis, life thickens -- the plot
thickens. In 1973, quite a few of us in Britain felt that the world was
going to end, or that we would be living in a different society, of
scarcity and necessity. I found a confirmation of this in a book by
Gilbert Adair -- Myths and Memories, published in 1986 -- in which he says
exactly that people thought the world was going to end then.

1980 and the time around then: I remember it as the coming of a new,
radical conservatism, with Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and Ronald Reagan
in the USA, and Helmut Kohl in what was still West Germany. It was also
the coming of Postmodernism. I had started working with Norman Potter, an
'out and out Modernist', as I think he once put it. We went through this
exercise of getting in touch with people that he had known or worked with
in the 1950s and 1960s -- people who might help with the new version of
his book. Were they still modernists? Some of them had changed. Some of
them were even becoming Postmodernists. (An architect like Terry Farrell
in Britain, author of many grim Postmodern edifices, would be a good
example of this.) It reminded me of a film of the 1950s, 'The Invasion of
the Bodysnatchers'. You look into the eyes of your girlfriend and see that
she is different, has a blank look, has been taken over by some alien
force.

With 9/11 and 2001, I don't feel the same sense of life thickening.
Perhaps it's just that I want to refuse this as a reason for a change of
practice. It's become a joke, almost. 'Why does this item cost more now?
-- 'Because of 9/11.' The price of shipping books from Europe to the USA
has gone up significantly in the last few years. I've been told that where
previously a shipment was examined superficially -- maybe just one crate
was opened out of many -- now every crate is opened and inspected. That
takes time and costs money. I suppose I feel that the events of 9/11 and
subsequently would never have happened if the USA had been following a
more forthright, open, even-handed foreign policy, in Israel-Palestine,
especially. So we are paying for this. I feel we need to go on despite
being told that everything is different now -- as if these events hadn't
happened. We need to assert some normality and continuity.


> There was something Anthony Froshaug once said to me: 'you've got the

> publishing bug as well.' He'd had it too. A lot of people have it.

> It's some wish to disseminate: to produce books or texts or

> information, and spread it around. Maybe it is a bug or a disease.

> There's something I do continually: if I see a newspaper article that

> I think will interest someone else, I cut it out and give it to them.

> Or I make two photocopies, and give one to that friend and the other

> to someone else. Maybe that's the publishing activity at its most

> basic: perhaps it's an instinct rather than a disease.


SB
Hyphen appears to be not only still afloat, but pretty stable, even
introducing new series and so on. While arts publishing generally seems to
be in some sort of crisis, driven to overproduction, blandness, and the
steady erosion of standards by the nature of both print economies and
middle management, how do you maintain this alternative?

RK
As far as my own publishing effort is concerned, the longer you go on, the
more you can build on what you've done. So, in the last five or six years,
books have begun to go out of print, and I've begun to make reprints or
new editions. What is a Designer is a case of this. In 2002 we made a
fourth edition in a smaller format. It's now a true pocket book. Perhaps
this is its final destination. (Norman Potter had died in 1995, so now
there was no awkward author to dispute the new format.) Another way of
consolidating is selling rights to translated editions, and this has begun
to happen now. It's very gratifying, and it helps the economy of the
effort, with royalties beginning to come in with no further expenses or
effort. Norman used to say, half seriously, 'what about the Chinese
market?' Last week I got an offer for a Chinese translation of one of the
books -- unfortunately not What is a Designer.

This leads on to a theme that I'd like to expand on, both in the
publishing, and perhaps in this interview. This is the reprinting of
existing work, and the rediscovery of old texts. It was how I started, by
bringing Potter's book back into existence. We did it again with Harry
Carter's book A View of Early Typography, which appeared in a Hyphen
edition in 2002, having been published by Oxford University Press in 1969,
and then lying out of print for many years. This act of re-publication
goes against the grain of publishing as it now exists in the bland
corporate sphere. The tendency of large-scale publishing is to forget the
old ones and to reinvent them. To some extent, this is understandable. The
subject matter, the methods, the technologies, may all have changed. A
book will begin to look dated in its design, and the firm that holds
rights in it may not want to rescusitate it as it stands. It seems to me a
noble and useful project to bring books back to life: at least, those
books that still have life in them. Small, marginal publishers are well
placed to do that.


> I suffer from a certain moralism. I've tended to make moral

> arguments, such as: 'this person has been neglected and should be

> better known', or 'this is an honest man; the world is full of

> dishonest people who are always in the headlines, why don't we pay

> attention to the ones who aren't in the headlines.'


SB
These notions of Reference and Renewal seem particularly timely. A few
years ago Will Holder and I produced a small-run publication called
Tourette's in which a tiny editorial note proposed: 'A lot has been said
already, and if we all keep trying to repeat and improve ourselves in new
ways, some of the nicest things might get lost in the resulting pile'; and
in the last Dot Dot Dot, Ben Watson and Esther Leslie wrote 'that which
burns brightest burns most briefly, and in true modernist fashion
brilliance must be but fleeting, timely, not eternal, a coincidence of
moment, viewer and object.' There's something about both these quotes
which affirms for me the idea of design as verb rather than noun -- as a
way of thinking rather than a material end product. When teaching I always
find myself talking about the importance of realising the thing you end up
with at the close of a project is merely one possible cut-off point of the
design, and that there still remain any number of potential directions or
possibilities for revision. This attitude of continuation was always
embodied for me by the fact that Potter's What is a designer has no
question mark. Perhaps you could unpack that title -- and that thought! --
for me.

RK
The title of Norman's book is poetic, suggestive, like everything he
wrote. In my mind, it means 'this is what I think design is; well, let's
try it this way and see where we get to.' Often bookshops or people who
ask about the book refer to it as 'What is a Designer?' with a question
mark. One colleague said it sounded like a careers advice text ('What is
Psychiatric Nursing?'). But the lack of a question mark in the title makes
all the difference. There is also the disjunction between 'what' and
'designer'. 'Who is a designer' or 'what is design' -- either of those
would be expected, but not this mixture of the impersonal and the
personal. Then he plays a nice trick by calling the first chapter 'What is
a designer?', with the emphasis on 'is'. We might have rammed this home by
calling that chapter 'So, what is a designer, anyway?'


> I remember a long conversation with Norman Potter and a common

> friend, in her garden, one summer evening. Norman persuaded me. He

> was a brilliant arguer: fantastically strong in reasoning. He said

> something like: 'You have to publish it yourself. That's part of the

> content.' He thought that the book itself should be a kind of

> demonstration: an exisistential acting-out. Perhaps it's like asking

> a composer if they can play the piece that they have composed. It's

> an exaggeration, but publishing the book myself was a kind of

> validation of what I was arguing. Certainly the form of the book,

> the design of it -- although now I'm not happy with that -- I felt

> this had to confirm or support the arguments of the book.


SB
Could you relate some of the particular lessons learned through
publishing, editing or designing of your own books? Have you refined your
approach? For example, was the recent introduction of Hyphen books in
standardised formats a reaction to your experience publishing the earlier
autonomous books?

RK
The trouble with my book Modern Typography, in its first edition, was, I
came to think, in its own design. The design suffered from being too
pondered: the process went on too long, without anyone pressing me to
finish it. And also the whole process of making it was quite introverted.
The wide left margin was meant to have pictures in it, to begin with. Then
I decided not to use marginal pictures, but somehow forgot that this could
mean that the left margin could be reduced, or that the page size could
become smaller. And so on. Looking back at it now, I think the design of
the book has a certain visible intention and a naivety or innocence. It's
an attempt to make books in a certain way. That feels good, even if the
details seem mostly wrong. In the second edition, we used a more modest
format, and it's more standardized in its design. It's less about the
design and more about the content.

The surprising thing to me is that the Hyphen books are, I think, rather
various in appearance and style. So far it has been like a journey,
meeting people along the way, walking with them a bit, and taking paths
that they suggest -- which wouldn't have happened if I'd been walking
alone, or according to a foreseen plan. It's like the essay form, which is
the way of writing that I feel most comfortable with: you start out not
knowing where you will go, and the form of the piece tends to be made up
as you go. T.W. Adorno expounds all this in his wonderful piece 'The essay
as form', which I read a few years ago with a great sense of confirmation.


> I'm very suspicious of separated history [...] What I want more is

> 'this poster from 1817 was made because of the great interest in

> whatever the topic is, and there was a development in printing

> technique which made it possible to make it so big, and there was an

> enlightened customer who had this much money to spend, but he ran out

> of money and this is why there were only ...' In other words, a more

> realistic level of discussion. I've seen that students who don't

> think they are interested in history are actually interested in this

> kind of discussion: they are drawn into it; it connects to their own

> experience.


SB
The retrospective rationalising and organising of history we mentioned
earlier must apply at a smaller scale to Hyphen Press too, in the sense
you describe of there having never been any masterplan, that you just
'fell into' publishing through certain friendships or the love of
particular works. I might argue that an aspect of the modernism your
publishing circumscribes is the very lack of any agenda or expectations,
only a set of moral working principles, and that it's precisely this lack
of presumption that breathes life into the work. Is it important to
maintain a sense of unknowing, of making it up as you go along? Have you
ever felt your work was becoming too predictable or out of breath?

RK
Yes, and more often recently. To do fresh work, as we're saying, you do
need to take a step back and pause. Then something different can happen.
It's perhaps what distinguishes mere journalism or 'journeyman work' from
more substantial writing or production. As a writer, eventually you reach
some point where the words just pour out without difficulty, as fast as
you can type them. To write for a living, which usually means writing
journalism, you do need to reach this state. But this is dangerous,
because of the risk that you start to 'run on empty' -- repeat ideas,
phrases, formulations. Or you just become a machine for rehashing given
material: putting pieces together out of quotes from people that you phone
or meet. This was one reason why I decided to stop a rather intensive
phase of journalism at the end of the 1980s, and put most of my effort
into something more long-lasting: making books. I felt I had begun to
repeat myself.

Norman Potter's work, and the experience of working with him, was and
still is formative for me. I remember he once told me he never gave the
same lecture twice. Of course this is disastrous for an easy, lucrative
career as a speaker on the conference circuit. But he felt that to keep it
lively you had to do it differently every time, according to the
circumstances of the audience, the venue, the occasion. I don't give many
talks anyway, but on the one or two occasions where I've repeated a
lecture, it's always gone wrong. Much better to do each one fresh. There
is more work of preparation, but on the day you have a charge of fresh
energy that isn't there with repetition.


> There were people making these manifestos, even, about what graphic

> design could or should be. My attempt was to discuss the arguments,

> and not the design that followed, or was said to follow, from the

> arguments. I thought the arguments were bad ones, and false. If you

> see what you think is confusion, and you think you know what the

> muddle is, then you go and say to the people saying these things

> 'look, you're confused'. [laughs] I begin to think that people found

> that quite strange. In graphic design, that is not so expected. Of

> course in philosophy or in history or other such areas, it happens

> all the time. That's partly what philosophy is: people saying 'look,

> this is what's going on here'.


SB
In his book 'A Year (With Swollen Appendices)' Brian Eno writes the
following in relation to the notion of abandoning what he calls 'axis
thinking': 'It's extraordinary that when the Berlin Wall came down
everyone assumed that the whole world was about to become one big market
economy running on the same set of rules. What happened instead was that
the old dualism Communism/Capitalism was revealed to conceal a host of
possible hybrids. Now only the most ideological governments (England,
Cuba) still retain their fundamendalist commitment to one end of the
continuum: most governments are experimenting vigorously with complicated
customized blendings of market forces and state intervention.'

I'd argue that you can effectively apply this view to the prevailing
condition of graphic design and typography (if not publishing), in the
sense that there are no longer any general concerns about affiliation with
some larger principle -- the most recent obvious dualism being, of course,
Modernism/Postmodernism. But I have to admit that feel a bit dualistic
about it myself:

On one hand I think this is a good thing. One point I forgot to mention in
my introduction about your Reading visit is that you also left behind your
polemical 'More Light' article, originally published in 1993, which I'm
guessing was some sort of precursor (maybe an angry younger brother) to
your Fellow Readers pamphlet. There you write: 'An approach: Traditional?
Modern? Postmodern? Forget those worries, and go back a step. Think what
it is that you want to do. Think for yourself! Disregard preconceptions,
models, influences.' In this sense, I think the current condition is
halfway there -- recent generations have forgotten those worries; the
struggle now is towards the independent thinking part. This is also summed
up nicely in a throwaway comment you make in answer to Petra's question
about why Graphic Design stars (and by implication any kind of celebrity)
are such a bad thing: because 'it stops people thinking for themselves'.

On the other hand I think it's a bad thing. The difficulty of writing
about the breed of modernism you practice and, in doing so, promote, is
that it's attitude rather than form, fluid rather than concrete, and
therefore difficult for people to get a handle on, because 'readers' are
used to having visual examples, when the form is typically 'read' as
shorthand for the ideas. The problem isn't really a fundamental set of
working principles itself, only when they become fundamentalist. I think
it's desirable to work with an explicit set of beliefs -- with
preconceptions, models and influences -- but I think the important thing
is that they're worked through and out individually, over time and
practice, not force-fed and swallowed. Without any principles at all you
end up with some kind of vaguely existential tribal drift that Roger
Bridgman lamented in his significantly-titled 'I'm scared' (1962) and 'Who
cares?' (2002) pieces in the early issues of Dot Dot Dot.

All this is leading up to saying there's a quiet, modest radicality to
Hyphen Press that I want to stick a flag in here, simply because it's easy
to miss. Radical has three basic meanings: 1. Arising from or going to a
root or source; 2. Departing markedly from the usual or customary; and 3.
Favouring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current
practices, conditions, or institutions. Both the uncommon historical span
in Modern Typography and its appendixed  'butterfly collection' of loaded
images demonstrate all three: arising from the root of the subject,
departing from the ways in which the subject is usually handled, and in
doing so acting as a model towards changing current practice. 'Fellow
Readers' is another clear example: the immediacy of the text and brevity
of its argument required a relatively speedy dissemination in order to
participate in a contemporary argument, which informed the resurrection of
the pamphlet format.

RK
There's a story I want to tell that perhaps qualifies some of the nice
things you're suggesting about my lack of dogmatism and the suggestion
that we've moved on beyond the polarities. I mention it in the spirit of
self-criticism and self-questioning. And I have to mention Norman Potter
again, though the attitude that he expressed is one that I share. A large
part of the point of not having pictures in What is a Designer is not to
prejudice readers, to allow them to think for themselves. Occasionally
Norman or I would encounter people who had read the book and thought it
was wonderful, inspiring. They would show us their work, and it seemed
really disappointing, just on the immediate level of appearance. We would
think silently 'oh dear, they just don't get it'. So there can be a
disjunction between ideas and products. You can have very good, noble
intentions and still make uninteresting work. In the end, what you want is
the thing itself, not the idea itself. What is an idea? An idea isn't
really something to keep you alive and healthy. But then again, maybe this
is to fall into polarization. What is most desirable is when these poles
disappear. What is produced is some fusion or embodiment. It has a
richness.


> It's a familiar paradox. You develop a system. In principle you can

> tell other people how to do the work. But when it comes to it, you

> realize that it's actually a little bit more complicated. You begin

> to think that it needs the original people to do it right. In other

> words, it's more like art than it is like science or method. What

> that art is is not exactly mysterious, but it's a subtle matter.


SB
This brings me back to the standardisation question again. In Petra's
interview you recalled Norman Potter urging you to self-publish Modern
Typography because the self-publishing -- the DIY -- was 'part of the
argument'. Are the recently-standardised Hyphen formats and typeface (Fred
Smeijers' Arnhem) be considered a model in the same way? Why arrive at
this point now, after a couple of decades of every book assuming a
different form? I was thinking recently about how the majority of graphic
design and typography I appreciate are those which feel 'standardised'
because they seem to have been designed by time rather than people. I'm
thinking of The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out:
all the result of a collective effort, spanning generations and technics,
rather than springing from some single genius moment. This might be
considered, like the revisiting and refining existing books that we
discussed earlier, in terms of publishing -- and designing -- as
palimpsest.

RK
Perhaps it's part of this feeling of doing it for the long term. But
certainly to fix the materials and the formats gives a freedom that I
enjoy. If the format, the paper, the binding method, the typeface, and so
on, are already given -- then you are free to get on with making the book.
You can play variations on the given materials. Maybe a certain title will
demand a different kind of paper. But then you have a starting point from
which to depart, and you are no longer facing the infinite -- which of
these five hundred possibilities shall I choose?

When I saw the typeface Arnhem, I thought, 'that's it'. At last there was
a good, strong typeface that had been designed to be a digital thing from
the start. So it could be superior to all the digitized versions of the
hot-metal classics, which always feel like not very good translations that
have lost something in the process. But Arnhem has the right balance of
character and anonymity. Plus, of course, it had been made by a close
colleague and friend, Fred Smeijers. So that felt good -- to be joining
hands with someone I knew well. Other contenders, such as Scala, designed
by another good friend, Martin Majoor, had always seemed a bit too
definite or stylish in their character. The typefaces I like most of all
are the ones that just seem to be there without calling attention to
themselves: newspaper typefaces, especially. I would have used Times and
Plantin all the time if we were still doing metal typography.


> Well, I come from an earlier culture, and an earlier generation. We

> were against heroes. As Brecht said, we wanted 'a land without

> heroes'. We thought that heroes only brought disasters. We were in

> favour of equality and collaboration, working without hierarchy. All

> those ideas.


SB
In slight relation to this, yet another quote, this time from John
Berger's latest novel, Here Is Where We Meet, in which he describes the
present condition as capitalist 'digital time' which continues forever
uninterrupted through day and night, the seasons, birth and death: 'It's
as indifferent to specifity and quality as money, and contrasts to the
cyclical time of nature, of cold and warmth, of presence and feeling [...]
digital time knows only vertical columns of ones and zeros, of cash flows
and dow indices. Within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or
established; journeys no longer have a specific gravity of a destination.
Destination has lost 'its territory of experience'.' It seems to me that
the production of books works towards the maintenance of such a territory.

Yes, that's one of the qualities that draws me to books. (Though,
unfortunately, the more books you make, the less books you have time to
read, or seem to be able to read.) But I cling to the idea that a book is
for the long term. It will be there for as long as we're still above
water. There's one part of the process of publishing that I enjoy
especially. In the UK, one is asked to send one copy of any new book to
the British Library, and copies also to the five 'legal deposit' libraries
in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Aberystwyth in Wales. When
that's done, I always have the feeling that the book is there for ever.
Even if every other copy is dispersed, or lost, or vandalized at Liverpool
docks (as happened with one of our shipments to the USA), there will still
be these six copies for the future.

I confess this is some sort of left-over religious attitude towards the
holy book. It's also why I will never be able to throw any book into the
rubbish bin, though some people I know can, or could, before the days of
recycling of paper. That kind of reverence also means that you have to do
everything to get the material of the book right, and free of error.
(Though, unfortunately, the books I've made have often been quite full of
mistakes -- usually the result of giving ourselves unwise deadlines, to
meet an exhibition opening or some such event.) Mistakes are the worst
things in a book. Well, the books I want to make are the long-lasting
ones. This becomes hard work in a culture in which books are being poured
out every week, many of them put together very rapidly by people who want
to 'do a book' as part of career advancement, whether as an academic or as
a chat-show host.


> If you throw everything away, then you end up with nothing --

> or with complete freedom, with individuals saying 'I have a right to

> do this; don't say anything about me, because you're interfering with

> my personal rights'. I'm not sure how this really connects with the

> deconstruction arguments. But I think it does, because part of that

> argument is to say that each reader makes his or her own reading:

> 'don't interfere with the reading that I am making; it's mine.' So

> yes, to boil it down, that was what that was all about. And now I

> think it has passed on. What is fashionable now, in purely visual

> terms, is not that wild deconstruction. Things have changed.


SB
Finally, a question I've wanted to ask you for a while now. A few years
ago, at the close of a piece I wrote about Maureen Mooren & Daniel van der
Velden's redesign of Archis magazine, I quoted a section in Modern
Typography where you suggest the prospect of 'an endless series of
'modernisms', of multiple pastiche, and a sad, restless search for
whatever might look new'. My conclusion was that this exactly described
the form and attitude of Archis (though not in a necessarily negative
way). At the time you hinted that I'd misunderstood your text. Could you
say why, and whether you feel since then we've descended to the situation
you anticipated there? Incidentally, I noticed you withdrew that entire
'Permanent restlessness' block of text that this came from in the second
edition...

RK
Archis was extreme. I was amazed when I saw it, and could hardly believe
what I was seeing. It looked rather Japanese, in that it was so largely
based on imitation of existing forms (the design-styles of other
magazines), with huge self-awareness, and fanatically precise details.
But, yes, I did think it was awful. My blunt criticism of it would be that
it was not just over-designed, but that the content was not well served.
It was hard to know what the articles were about. Maybe this all mirrored
the complexity of a world now saturated with media and representation. But
in these circumstances, what is good to have is not a mirror, but the
sharp knife of a clear analysis. I remember that in the copies I borrowed
from you, after you had written your article in Eye (no.45, 2002), the one
article I really wanted to read had been torn out -- along the neatly
serrated margin that all the pages had! Tear-out pages are, I feel, truly
something that you might see in a nightmare.

When I wrote that passage in the first edition of Modern Typography, I was
making a criticism, against the prospect of new modernisms that are just
pastiches (the word was definitely meant as a put-down). It's perhaps
interesting to try to make distinctions between things made now that go
under the name of 'modernism'. For example, the architecture of Richard
Meier is modernist, but I've always felt there was an element of pastiche
in it, as if he knows too much about the history of modern architecture.
His 'white architecture' has too many memories of the white buildings of
heroic modernism, and it doesn't feel so appropriate in dull northern
climates, such as you get in The Hague (the town hall there, designed by
Meier's office). Perhaps this works better in the buildings for the Getty
Center in Los Angeles. Also the kinds of buildings he has done -- often
large buildings, for rich clients -- don't have the spare quality that
animates the modern work that we tend to like best. The early work of
Norman Foster had a fresh, spare modernist spirit, but now most of what
the Foster office does feels rather dead, because of the size of it, the
materials.

When I wrote the first edition of that book I did feel more embattled than
I do now. It was the mid-1980s, and the time of ascendant post-modernism
in all parts of life. It was a more polemical moment. Now a lot of that
has passed, and the worst of post-modernism -- the very superficial, badly
made things, such as the Memphis furniture from Milan -- now look
laughable (if they ever didn't). I don't think I can explain why, but the
situation feels better now. Objectively seen, it isn't. The galloping
changes to the way our climate works, the degradation of the environment,
the political crises all over the world -- one could go on and on. But
twentieth-century modernism, at its brightest and most hopeful, lived in
the shadow of catastrophe -- two huge wars. Rather than the 'sad and
restless' of the recent past, maybe the spirit now is of a sharpening of
the senses.

+ This interview originally appeared in Textfield V, Fall & Winter
2006-2007, pp. 72-81.