The German Illustrated Book

Typography is the major communications advance between the invention of writing and twentieth-century electronic mass communications. It played a pivotal role in the social, economic and religious upheavals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Literacy was of limited value to a medieval peasant who has no hope of gaining access to books. Typography radically altered education. Learning became an increasingly private, rather than communal, process. Typography created a sequential and repeatable ordering of information and space that encourages linear thought and logic. It inspired a categorisation and compartmentalisation of information that formed the basis for empirical scientific inquiry.

Design innovation did emerge in Germany, where woodcut artists and typographic printers collaborated to develop the illustrated book and broadsheet. In Italy, the letter styles and format design inherited from illuminated manuscripts gave way to a design approach unique to the typographic book. A short space was skipped, and then Incipit launched the book.

Origins of the illustrated typographic book

Early in the evolution of the typographic book, Bamberg printer Albrecht Pfister began to illustrate his books with woodblock prints. As the decades passed, typographic printers dramatically increased their use of woodblock illustrations. This created a booming demand for blocks, and the stature of graphic illustrators increased. Typographic paragraph marks leave nothing for the rubricator in the volume. The printed book was becoming independent of the manuscript. Rewich was a careful observer of nature who introduced crosshatch illustration in the volume. His illustrations included regional maps, significant buildings and views of major cities.

Origins of the illustrated typographic book 

Nuremberg becomes a printing centre

Page layouts range from a full double-page illustration of the city of Nuremberg to purely typographic pages without illustrations. On some pages, woodcuts are inserted into the text. Rectangular illustrations are placed under or above type areas. When the layout threatens to become repetitious, the reader is jolted by an unexpected page design. Volume and depth, light and shadow, texture and surface are created by black ink on white paper, which becomes a metaphor for light in a turbulent world of awesome powers.

The further development of the German illustrated book

Rockner carried this design quality even further in an effort to duplicate the gesture freedom of the pen. As many as eight alternate characters were designed and cast for each letterform. These had sweeping calligraphic flourishes, some of which flowed deep into the surrounding space. When the book was published, other printers insisted that these ornamental letterforms must have been printed from woodblocks, refusing to believe it possible to achieve these effects with cast metal types. This ephemeral form of graphic communications became a major means for information dissemination from the invention of printing until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Development of the German illustrated book

Typography spreads from Germany

They mistakenly thought they had discovered authentic Roman writing, in contrast to the black medieval lettering that they erroneously believed to be the writing style of he "barbarians" who had destroyed Rome. They tried to unify these contrasting alphabets by adding serifs to some of the minuscule letters and redesigning others. Space was left for these to be rubricated by scribe with red ink. A small letter was printed in the space left for an illuminated initial, informing the scribe what initial to draw. To a greater degree than in any other country, French block printers and typographic printers joined forces to duplicate the design of illuminated manuscripts.

German typography

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].