BIBLIOFILE

Even before opening The Form of the Book Book (2010), nay even touching it, by sheer visual impact alone, i.e. a daffodil yellow jacket with red oxide sans serif lettering, it produces a sensation as zingy as a bowl of scrupulously prepared fresh fruit salad.

Then there's the mental double-take caused by that tautological 'book book', which is soon ironed out though by the complete absence of graphic clutter. The letters speak for themselves, and so the reader gets it: this is a book about the nature of books, a meta-book.

Edited by Sarah De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge, this collection of seven papers given at The Form of the Book Conference in 2009 at St Bride library, is intended to be a homage to Jan Tschichold's eponymously titled text. In fact, the dust jacket has a generous flap that allows the designers to print in full Tschichold's imperious 'Ten Common Mistakes in the Production of Books'. In effect then the contents must be read as either affirmation or transgression of his lapidary remarks.

The first two contributions focus on representative figures from differing phases of 20th century architectural modernism. Catherine de Smet examines Le Corbusier from the graphic design perspective of his journals and books, stressing the importance of publications such as the series L'Esprit Nouveau or Les Plans de Paris (1922-26) in any reading of his buildings. de Smet calls Le Corbusier's ambivalence towards the new, 'semi-modernity', noting how for instance he revelled in Bauhaus style photomontage and the bleeding full page visual, while also maintaining a stubborn attachment to Antique Baton Allongee an archaic sounding yet sans serif font, even fighting battles with the publisher Gonthier over its use. Set against this though was his love of 'graphie latine' and colour fields, with a refusal to adopt the grid as a matrix to organise information. In the process Le Corbusier actually rejected the Swiss typographical lay out values as propounded by Tschichold, defining himself as more of a pick-and-mix postmodernist than is often thought.

James Goggin's paper looks at a raft of books about the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark, characterising the design philosophy behind many of these publications as a 'complex', particularly the way that Matta-Clark's 'building cuts' presented an obvious metaphor to exploit. Goggins is well aware of the dangers of pastiche as a way to achieve respectability, and comes down firmly in favour of a hard won balance between content and decoration, sceptical about such flash Harry books as Phaidon's Gordon Matta-Clark (2003) with its exposed spine and coloured thread.

In its three central papers The Form focuses on how the very identity of the book has been at stake since the early 1940s. In Eneqvist, Fruh and Neuenschwander's '1946, 1947, 1948: The Most Beautiful Swiss Books in Retrospect' the authors nominate a group of contemporary typographers, graphic designers, bookshop owners etc to pick their own favourite publications for a best books competition that confabulates the three missing years, a historical hiatus caused by its founder Tschichold's departure for England to work at Penguin. This throws up some magnificent objects, ie Poetes a l'Ecart (1946), a multi-lingual anthology with a Swiss grid cover, a catalogue raisonne Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1948) and the highly recommended Wir Neger in Amerika (1948) with its photogravure images and sans serif typeface providing 'an almost cinematic experience'. The graphic design historian Richard Hollis, who contributes Ways of Seeing Books, also references the era of high modernism, particularly such texts as Graphic Forms (1949), and Books for Our Time (1951). He muses on a perceived technological sclerosis since Gutenberg, citing resistance to typographical/visual change as proof that there has been no wholesale revolution in the format of the book, despite his own best efforts with John Berger's G (1972). Ironically perhaps Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle will trigger off that change in hard copy publishing?

Chrissie Charlton's 'Working with Herbert Spencer: A Pioneer of Modern Typography' sees The Form revert to a more biographical mode. Charlton's memoir is the product of her time spent as Spencer's assistant in the 1970s, involving anything from pasting up galley proofs with cow gum to preparing images using Letraset. Spencer himself emerges as a fairly laid back yet utterly scrupulous designer, with a very strong track record in catalogues and handbooks.

The two remaining papers examine the stakes surrounding the identity of the book. Sarah Gottlieb's 'A Conversation with Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book', teases out several important issues about the shift from the printed page to the networked screen, unbound by space or time. Stein is utopian in a practical way, remarking that 'a book is a place where readers and writers can congregate', uncertain where the boundaries lay between cahier and blog, yet certain that work is Joycean in so far as it is always in progress. For him the digital age needs its own set of tools and enlightened protocols, that If:book is attempting to underwrite as we speak. 'Every Book Starts with an Idea: Notes for Designers' by Armand Mevis is pedagogic too, a sort of q & a session about book design, treating the 'shape of content' as a heuristic business, often requiring slash and burn before successful typo(-graphic) formulas are reached, the physical elements of a publication telling the story of its construction, a journey through a garden of forked paths.