Rudolf Koch: Letterer, Type Designer, Teacher. (First Edition)

CINAMON, Gerald. Rudolf Koch: Letterer, Type Designer, Teacher. New Castle, Delaware & London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2000.

Quarto (29 x 22 cm). Original publisher's black cloth. Pictorial dust jacket. 208 pp., illustrated with approximately 300 reproductions of Koch's work. Bibliographies of Koch's writings and private-press publications. First edition, published simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The definitive work on Rudolf Koch (1876-1934), among the finest typographers in history. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Koch maintained a practice of such range and integrity that it resists easy categorisation. He was a type designer whose faces — Neuland, Kabel, Koch Antiqua — became central to the visual language of the century; a calligrapher and hand letterer who worked with pen and brush on vellum and parchment in a tradition running directly back to the medieval scriptoria.

As a teacher of legendary influence at the Offenbach art school, he gathered around him a community of practitioners committed to the idea that making things by hand was not a retreat from modernity but a form of human completeness.

Gerald Cinamon, himself a Yale-trained book designer and typographer with a lifetime's practice behind him, is uniquely equipped to assess Koch's achievement, and provides a well-documented account of his life and work as a designer and teacher, perceptive insights into his design achievements, and a wealth of hitherto unpublished illustrations. 

Fine in a very good/near fine unclipped dust jacket. Jacket spine shows shelf fading. A small amount of extremely faint foxing to the dust jacket inner faces. Otherwise in beautiful condition throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000330