A TYPOGRAPHER'S ABC

Jost Hochuli, Swiss typographer and graphic designer, delivers here 26 reflections – one for each letter of the alphabet – on the questions and personalities that have marked his practice of typography. By turns luminous, disconcerting, funny, tragic, acerbic, critical, erudite… Jost Hochuli takes advantage of the brevity of the ABC book format – never more than two pages per letter – and the arbitrary choice of subjects to tell an anecdote, to convey an idea that is close to his heart, to fight against both aesthetic calligraphy and full-on modernism, to make revelations about Jan Tschichold and the monsters of the history of Swiss typography that he rubbed shoulders with when he was starting his career.
At over 80 years old, he offers here to graphic designers and typographers, young and old, a concentrate of wisdom and rants, calling on his reader to trust the experience of their eye rather than the dogmatic injunctions of schools. Paradoxically as traditionalist as nonconformist, straying from the beaten track only to better return to the timeless fundamentals of typography – readability above all! –, Jost Hochuli offers a powerful voice to a stoic modern classicism stemming from book typography.