On the occasion of an exhibition about Jan I Moretus – the Moretus in ‘Plantin-Moretus’ – Fred Smeijers is giving a public lecture on ‘present-day typography’ at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp on 28 October. More information here.

On Thursday 28 October (7.30 pm) at the Highgate Library in Chester Road, London N19, Robin Kinross will be speaking about his work with Hyphen Press. He will spend a good part of the evening looking at books from the library’s stock and thinking aloud about ordinary book production: what is acceptable, what is not so good, what is unremarkable but OK, and so on, in typesetting, printing, and binding.

The third edition of Karel Martens’s Printed matter / Drukwerk is being printed by Thoben in Nijmegen now; sheets will then be sent to the binders, Hendricks–Lützenkirchen in Kleve, across the border in Germany. The binding will be done in batches and will take some weeks, but we should have copies at the end of this month – just in time for the Frankfurt bookfair.

Copies of Otto Neurath’s ‘visual autobiography’ arrived in London a few days ago. The book has been designed and its pages made by one of its editors, Christopher Burke; it was printed by Die Keure in Bruges and bound by SVK Boekbinderij, also in Belgium. Unusually for us, the book is a cloth-covered hardback, with a loose jacket. We felt that we should give this degree of permanence to the first full publication of Neurath’s text. Three different papers are used in the book, to distinguish and support the three main sections: the introductory material, Neurath’s text, and an appendix that shows a sample of his extraordinary collection of visual material. The book goes on sale in Europe at the end of this month. Copies are now just starting their journey by ship to our distributors in North America.