This year’s catalogues for the best-designed/-produced books have been appearing. The Swiss catalogue for books issued in 2006 is just published. The German catalogue for the same period came out some weeks ago. The British publication, also carrying the designation ‘2006’, was produced towards the end of last year. The Dutch best-books catalogue is on its way, and will cover books published in 2006. With the exception of the British publication, these catalogues describe and discuss books that are put on exhibition in their own countries, and which are also, in the autumn, added to a showing at the Frankfurt Book Fair of all the world’s best-books of that preceding year. A proper survey of the best-books exhibitions would take in all the countries represented at Frankfurt, including (as I recall) Finland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, the United States, Spain. These remarks are addressed to the countries with which I am most familiar.

On Tuesday of this week, Christopher Burke talked in London on ‘Jan Tschichold: the missing typefaces’ to the Friends of St Bride Library. Speaking without notes, and in full command of his subject, he described and analysed the previously almost unconsidered typeface designs that Tschichold made in the 1930s. Prompted by the need for extra income in the difficult years of economic crisis in Germany, and then of his emigration to Switzerland, Tschichold offered some frankly commercial designs to a number of typefoundries. This was despite his belief, sometimes expressed in his writings, that such new typefaces were dubious affairs motivated by the pressures of capitalist competition, and perhaps just not necessary at all. A slightly later and also larger commission was his design of typefaces for the early photocomposition machine, the Uhertype.

Paul Stiff’s obituary of Peter Burnhill is published in The Guardian today.