Nearly 90 years after Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) – one of the 20th century’s most influential typographers, poster and book designers – was forced to flee from the National Socialists to Switzerland in autumn 1933. The city of Leipzig dedicated a memorial plaque to one of its famous sons. The house in Schorlemmerstr. 8 in Leipzig-Gohlis, where the designer lived from 1922 to 1924, was chosen for the plaque in collaboration with the German Museum of Books and Writing. This is where, in the early 1920s, he invented his “New Typography”, which eventually made him famous far beyond Leipzig’s borders and a pioneer of the functional Bauhaus typography.

The German Museum of Books and Writing was gifted Tschichold’s extensive estate in 2015. It encompasses approx. 40,000 pages: from Tschichold’s first calligraphic experiments as a school student, to his designs for the “New Typography”, through to his late works on Asian printing. A selection of these were displayed in the 2019 exhibition “Jan Tschichold – a once-in-a-century typographer?”

For the German Museum of Books and Writing, the collection is both a generous gift and a cultural obligation. In a digitisation and cataloguing project funded by the German Research Foundation, the internationally sought-after legacy is therefore being made available online in 2021.

Find out more about the German Museum of Books and Writing.

DNB, Claudia Seeber

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Memorial plaque in honour of Jan Tschichold.

Pagination

: Gedenktafel Tschichold …