Last Thursday the London publisher Libris brought out Erdmut Wizisla’s Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the story of a friendship. This is an English-language edition of the book published originally by Suhrkamp. Behind that edition was a first embodiment, as its author’s doctoral thesis. The translation from thesis to book is a difficult one, and a process that is rarely resolved well. The transmutation of such a complex book from one language into another is also a difficult business. Some of the issues raised by these endeavours have been brought up, also in connection with Walter Benjamin’s writings, in two previous posts here, in August and December of last year.

The ‘Isotype revisited’ research project at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, has now launched its website.

Following his ‘Mitteleuropa and Bethnal Green, 1946’, Paul Stiff expands on another theme of Modern typography in Britain.

The typographer Alexander Verberne died on 27 May 2009. After a stroke in 1997, which was followed by further strokes, he had been seriously impaired and was living in a care-home in The Hague. He was born on 18 August 1924 in Den Helder.

Every one a chaconne, the second recording by The Bach Players has just arrived in physical form and will be launched publicly at the group’s concerts in Cork, Norwich, and London in the coming week.

In another of those warehouse discoveries, a few copies of the late Peter Burnhill’s Type spaces have come to light, after we had declared it out of print here (our North American distributor still has some left). There are several reasons to get hold of this book, which we are unlikely now to reprint. The most important reason is that, in effect, it puts forward a new theory of typography. Along the way, you can find advice on how to determine linespacing (‘leading’); after digesting this you will never need to spend time agonizing over this fundament of text-setting. And the book is a model of industrial production, especially in its binding. These last few copies are for sale only from this website.

This week we received copies of Modern typography in Britain: a very packed and rich set of discussions, which will surely come to define its still too little comprehended subject. The book is at the same time Typography papers 8, and continues Typography papers’s work of publishing fully serious, lively and comprehensible articles.