In connection with his forthcoming book Active literature, Christopher Burke will be talking on 19 June at the St Bride Printing Library in London on ‘Jan Tschichold: the missing typefaces’. An exhibition at the Library of work by Tschichold, curated by Christopher Burke and Robin Kinross, will open then and be on display through to 23 August. Go here for more information.

This review has just appeared in the new number (no. 11) of Text, within an issue on the theme of ‘Edition & Typographie’.

The faculty of architecture at the TU Delft commissioned Karel Martens to design booklets, flyers, stationery, and a poster for their series of six seminars this spring on ‘Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere’. Martens, working in collaboration with his daughter Aagje Martens, took up the implications of the title ‘Architectural Positions’, and the need to make flyers and booklets for the six occasions and for the series as a whole, but on a small budget. Just three printing plates were used for the colour printing, each containing two of the pieces; colour (cyan, magenta, yellow) was changed three times. In this way six different combinations or ‘positions’ were obtained. The black text is stable and clear. This patterning is enacted again in the website for the series. Not for the first time with this designer, the restrictions were embraced, with maximum effect.

Peter was there in Stafford as a constant point of reference for me for about thirty years. I remember making what seemed like a pilgrimage from Reading to Stafford, in 1977, to meet him for the first time, and the others around him in the group that made and ran the typography course at the College of Art and Design. Before this, as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I knew about him as a co-writer of a fundamental article in the journal Visible Language (‘Experiments with unjustified text’), as a presence in the thinking behind our course at Reading, and as one of the people on the network that I had begun to discover – of designers such as Anthony Froshaug, Norman Potter, Ernest Hoch. They were intellectual and practical father figures, who were all apparently ageless in their immediate democratic engagement with anyone: serious (and often very funny), dissenting and leftist, disseminating.

We are taking part in the London Book Fair, at Earls Court, from 16 to 18 April. Find our books at the stand of our representatives, Troika, stand Z640.

The Hyphen Press website appears today in a new form. There are many added and altered features, providing much content beyond the simple description of the books we publish. The old ‘Column’ section – which in retrospect seems to have been a sort of proto-blog – is now made more visible, and will become a backbone of the new website. It is now called ‘Journal’, and includes short pieces of news about Hyphen activities, comments on and links to things that interest us, and some longer articles. All the text on the site is searchable. The books are now shown in photographs, rather than scans, and we will provide downloads of sample pages. Later this year we plan to add a shop from which books can be bought online.