Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)

Of Books

OF BOOKS Books are not the enforced warrens of words, sentences or other artistic work. There are badly produced books, just as there are badly written poems - or vice versa. Producing a good book, making conscious use of the paper, the typographical organisation representing the content of the text, the sewing or the binding, the characteristic shaping of the inner content and the outer form - are all serious creative tasks. We understand a book through our optical and tactile senses; these two aspects are thus fundamental to the production of books. Let it be understood that, on the one hand, there are books with good poetic, scholarly, technical, etc. content, and, on the other, there are books as such, as objects, as pieces of skilled production. When talking of books without the definition of the text, which is only a partial element of the whole, we mean an object constructed of different materials. A good book is a work of art that is a material object. Its characteristics-that of the pure type-are economy, durability, easy producibility, emphasis on parts meant to rouse public attention, in short, the perspicuity of inner content and outer form. There were times when books, in opposition to their function, served the acquisitive passion of magnates and the aestheticism of respectable citizens in our time, a book is a necessary commodity, and therefore its character should be determined by utilitarian generality, not by individual aesthetics. We have no need of charmingly beautiful books, it is cheap, durable and convenient ones that we need. We are men of comfort and speed. For us a book is not a lifeless knick-knack but an active partner in our lives, an important element of our daily needs. But we like food easily digestible, clothes tailored comfortable, a home airy and luminous - it is understandable that we expect the same of books, that our hands might touch them with a good feeling, that our eyes might capture the published material easily and with least loss. We may all have had the experience that, say, a poem, good in itself, is made totally repugnant by the publisher's saving on paper or the printer's ineptitude; or, at the other extreme, one is vexed by publications of amateur snobbery: the Bible or Marx in vestpockets. We must protest against such trash produced by barbarian niggardliness or aesthetic puerility and against priggish kitsch, but we cannot prescribe for ourselves any formal criterion. The merit of a book, its quality as a material object, is always determined by the material used for printing. Its success, if we disregard the influence of external factors (lack of skill and ill-conceived material interest), depends on the right or wrong typography. It is the typography of a book that we see as dominating, it is the one that conveys the communicated content to our senses and brains. It is therefore highly important that the typography of a book should be objective, easily graspable and effective in its whole appearance as measured to the conveyed material. Apart from stingy publishers and careless writers, "modern" graphic artists have also efficiently contributed to the slovenliness of books. These neat-handed and shallow-minded individuals think of the white pages and even the spaces between the passages in a book as material purely for decoration, and fill them with their individual tricks and decorative doodles. They could not care less that needless Secession 2 (New York - Berlin 1922) Cover, 230x140 mm "decoration" spoils the individual character of a book; and thereby they have disastrously influenced not only public tastes but the whole development of the publishing industry. In magazines of graphic art we can readily observe that typesetters, obsessed by some pseudo-expressionism in spite of their skill, hazard their potential and fall into a formalism totally contrary to the material of the printing press. Fashioning the type of book that represents our times is undoubtedly put in the hands of the young generation of printers. We can hardly expect any measurable result until they realise that, instead of their individual dabbling in art, they have to return to the given material of serial production, direct expression and, in general, the economical laws of creation. TISZTASÁG KÖNYVE (THE BOOK OF PURITY), 1926, pp. 13-14. 9