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Book design in St. Gallen
Thursday 4 to Friday 19 March 2010
Talks and exhibition of past and present work
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February 2010
Claire Bolton
Zainer’s imperfect impressions:
fifteenth century printing methods
The fifth annual Justin Howes memorial lecture
- Tuesday 23 February 2010 at 7pm
- In the Bridewell Hall, St Bride Foundation
- Admission is free but by pre-booked ticket only
How did the first printers achieve the (almost impossible) task of getting crisp impressions of inked type onto paper, evenly, clearly and repeatedly? Well, quite often they did not manage it – this lecture will illustrate how some of the various faults and imperfections found in early printed books provide clues to fifteenth-century printing methods.
Claire Bolton has worked for over 35 years as a letterpress printer – researching, writing, designing, hand setting the type, printing pages on a hand press, and binding books in limited editions at her Alembic Press. Running the Press fostered a lifelong interest in the history of printing, paper and bookbinding, which formed the subject matter of many of the Press’s 100 editions.
A few years ago she decided to put her practice into theory and began to research fifteenth-century printing practices. This gave her the excuse to spend many happy hours looking at incunables; her resulting PhD thesis will be published by the Oxford Bibliographical Society in 2010.
March 2010
Book design in St. Gallen
- Exhibition
- Thursday 4 to Friday 19 March 2010
- Opening hours Monday–Friday 9am–6pm (until 9.30pm on Wednesdays)
- In the Exhibition Room, St Bride Library
- Admission free
- Two evening talks
- Thursday 4 March and Wednesday 17 March 2010 at 7pm
- Admission £7 · concessions £5 · Friends of St Bride Library £3
Evening talks
Exhibition
For centuries, St. Gallen’s relationship to the book was determined by two institutions: the Stiftsbibliothek, with its extremely valuable mediaeval holdings, and the Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana, originally a humanist library. Renowned for its textile industry, and, from late mediaeval times onwards, as a centre of trade, St. Gallen was not, however, a printers’ town like Basle with Amerbach, Petri and Froben or Zurich with Froschauer.
For this reason, the exhibition looks back on just some 60 years of book design in St. Gallen. The first publisher of note is Zollikofer in the 1940s, with books by Imre Reiner and later with work by Rudolf Hostettler and Max Koller. In the 1950s, Tschudy brought out several noteworthy books, and Erker began publishing in the following decade, with Hans-Peter Kaeser as designer. Jost Hochuli has had an impact on book design not only in St. Gallen, but nationally and internationally, in particular with his work for the VGS Verlagsgemeinschaft St. Gallen and with his books on typographical design, which have been translated into several languages. The design team of TGG Hafen Senn Steiger have developed, since the 1990s, an assured approach to typography that has resulted in some original book design. Interesting in this context is also the Vexer Verlag of Josef Felix Müller, with his artists’ books. Gaston Isoz, who works in Berlin, has produced internationally recognized book designs in recent years; he learnt the basics of his profession at the Schule für Gestaltung in St. Gallen.
Some of the over 65-year-olds are still at work, and coming after the middle generation are young designers who have not long completed their training. The book, that three-dimensional and, once opened, axially symmetrical object, unmatched for its functionality for hundreds of years, will surely continue to offer them, and those who come after them, opportunities for new, original solutions.
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