This review of the book Wim Crouwel: mode en module, by Frederike Huygen and Hugues Boekrad, was written for and published in an issue Typography papers, now out of print.[1] The Crouwel book, as it was often referred to, was issued only in a Dutch edition, which sold out quickly. Since then, Wim Crouwel’s renown has only increased. Most recently his work has been celebrated in a major exhibition (at the Design Museum, London, 2011, and on show from this month at The Lighthouse, Glasgow); in The Hague he has been awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize (2009, with an exhibition following in 2012). Wim Crouwel: mode en module is now something of a fabled work, with large prices asked for second-hand copies. Given the continuing absence of an English-language edition of the book – which would surely be a tough translation, editorial, and production job, as well as an expensive one – this review may be worth resurrecting, as a marker of a moment in the discussion of graphic design. This version of my text is essentially as published in Typography papers, with a few updating remarks added in the notes.

Robin Fior died on 29 September, in hospital at Mafra, outside Lisbon. This is not an obituary (his friend Richard Hollis has written a good one), but merely a set of memories of someone I knew, off and on, over twenty or so years. He was part of a certain network of designers in Britain, whose work has provided a main impetus for Hyphen Press.

This is the cover of the pamphlet Fellow readers: notes on multiplied language, which Hyphen Press put out in 1994. The piece was prompted by the debates over typography that had been published in the pages of Emigre and Eye magazines, and elsewhere. A participant in this discussion, I saw the chance to make a more extended contribution when my book Modern typography was coming up for a reprint. This was in 1994, just as the wind was beginning to go out of this little Anglo-American storm. I gave the publication the format of Modern typography (in its first edition of 1992), using the same typeface, and page construction, and wrote to fill 32 pages – which would be just enough to give it a spine with the author and title on it. The margins carried quite a few notes: I was conscious that Modern typography’s margins had been underused. I imagined that the printers might make the book and the pamphlet in the same production process, which they almost did. Fellow readers seemed to serve its purpose. Though slender, as a free-standing publication it made more of a mark than any magazine article could.

David Wild recently wrote a brief note on the history of the collages that he has been making over 35 years. We give it here, with the examples to which he refers.

On 13 October in Antwerp Fred Smeijers spoke some words of introduction at the opening of the exhibition ‘The Most Widely Read Man in the World: Matthew Carter’, on show until the end of the year at the Catapult gallery. We are glad to publish the text here, both for its homage to Matthew Carter (son of Harry Carter) and in its own right, as a piece of writing. If you like this, you may also enjoy Smeijers’s meditations on ‘what is a classic typeface?’. (For their advice and help in publishing this, thanks to Fred Smeijers, Matthew Carter, and Eric Kindel.)

Peter Campbell died yesterday at his home, after being diagnosed last year with cancer. He was a special man, both in his nature and in the combination of his talents. We were very glad to publish his writings, and to add him to the list of Hyphen authors, who seem often to be people whom the world finds it hard to pin down. We expect fuller accounts of him will be published, but meanwhile we can give here the ‘afterword’ to At …, a collection of his reviews from the London Review of Books. (This also allows us to correct the description of the context of the start of the London Review of Books, which was badly muddled in the book’s text.)

Our re-issue of two novels by E.C. Large, Sugar in the air and Asleep in the afternoon, and publication of a companion work, God’s amateur, prompted this piece in Lodown (no. 74), the magazine of ‘Populärkultur und Bewegungskunst’, published from Berlin. The introduction and email interviews are by Renko Heuer.

This book review was written for the Designgeschiedenis Nederland website. It is published here in slightly adapted form, as a follow-up to an earlier review of publications about Isotype.

An obituary of Paul Stiff was published in The Guardian on 7 April – see here. What follows below is an extended and re-edited version of that text.

When we were planning to publish music CDs, I tried to keep in mind that (since all the decisions were in our hands) it was a chance to think freshly and not – or not necessarily – use the reigning model of a plastic jewel case with printed ‘inlay’ sheet and booklet. I thought it would be good to try to do without plastic. It might cost a bit more money, but at least we could make a nice thing: more friendly than the jewel-case model, and perhaps more economic-elegant in its materials. This seemed important in the light of the burning question of ‘why make CDs anyway, why not just issue sound files for downloading?’ If you offer a pleasant and desirable thing, with material qualities that can never be downloaded, then it can be worth the effort and the cost of still publishing physical objects. The same set of thoughts applies, of course, to printed books and e-books.