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

Sergei Egorov (it must be him) has made an analysis of a column of Aldine text that seems to correlate with Peter Burnhill’s findings in Type spaces.

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.

Peter Burnhill died in hospital at Stafford on Sunday 11 March, aged 84. We will publish something here soon about him and his work.

The ‘Optimism of modernity’ project has posted its first ‘documents’.

In an unusually perceptive appreciation of the book in his ‘Schrift & Charakter’ column (Institut für Textkritik), Roland Reuß defends Burnhill against the charge of over-interpretation (‘the usual objection when someone has thoroughly reflected on something and the public is ashamed’), and even suggests that our book can bear comparison, in its production, with its Aldine subjects. But some hundreds of the public have gone so far as to buy this item; a reprint is being planned.

The new issue of Typography papers (no. 4), published by the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading contains an article by Peter Burnhill, ‘Type spaces’, and a symposium on these ideas. This is the first presentation of his research into the typography of Aldus Manutius. Burnhill finds a unified system of dimensions to be present there, as both a physical and a syntactic structuring device. A group of designers then respond to this thesis. We plan to publish Burnhill’s work fully, as a book. Meanwhile, readers are urged to get hold of this interim publication.