An article by Juliet Fleming on ‘How to look at a printed flower’ Word & Image, vol. 22, no. 2, 2006) throws surprising light on a usually unregarded element of the typographic armoury. Fleming works her way from early appearances of flowers in English printing (Henry Denham in the 1560s), via the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant (‘flowers are free natural beauties’) and the printed floral wallpaper that was contemporary with Kant, via ‘arabesques’ and the pattern-making of Islamic art, to the suggestion that these flowers and arabesques achieved their effects just through this exoticism that ‘allowed them to appear to presuppose no concept, with a technology that transformed copying into standardised reproduction, and thus took it out of the force field of imitation’.

A symposium on Otto Neurath and the after-effects of his visual work (Isotype) will be held on 31 October at Stroom Den Haag. Among those speaking are Frank Hartmann, Robin Kinross, Kristóf Nyíri, and Femke Snelting.

With its issue of April—May 2006 (no. 70), the magazine Tipográfica entered its twentieth year of publication. Published from Buenos Aires since its first issue of May 1987, the magazine is now established as one of the liveliest and most internationally minded design magazine: though rooted in typography, most issues contain pieces on graphic design and design more generally, with a strong interest in the social and philosophical aspects of the subject. More than most design publications of the moment, Tipográfica puts European and North American preoccupations into salutary perspective. For this anniversary issue, Tipográfica asked twenty ‘prominent personalities’ to write brief pieces in response to questions posed by the magazine’s editorial group: a different question for each respondent. Among respondents were Robert Bringhurst, Christopher Burke, Matthew Carter… and on to Hermann Zapff. Perhaps the most entertaining contribution came from Fred Smeijers. We reproduce it here, with kind permission of Tipográfica.

Reviews of The stroke have begun to appear. Gerrit Noordzij’s writings present a particular challenge to their readers. ‘Do not believe what you read’, the author seems to say. ‘What I am saying is what seems to me to be true; but you need to sort it out for yourself, with the help of my explorations, if they interest you.’ He asks for a thinking-along with him. Not so many reviewers want to put in the work of engagement. Erik Spiekermann’s review appears, in its original German, in the journal Text (no. 11, 2006), edited at the Institut für Textkritik, and published in Frankfurt a.M. by Stroemfeld Verlag. For permission to publish this translation, thanks to the editors and publishers of Text, and Erik Spiekermann.