tschichold archive

Born in Leipzig, the son of a sign painter, Jan Tschichold trained as a calligrapher before becoming one of the most influential typographers of the twentieth century. His 1925 special issue of Typographische Mitteilungen, elementare typographie, and his 1928 book Die neue Typographie made him the leading voice of typographic modernism. In March 1933 the Nazis arrested him as a “cultural Bolshevist”; after six weeks in custody he emigrated to Basel in August of that year. There he gradually abandoned the dogmas of the New Typography for a renewed classical approach – a reversal he defended for the rest of his life. From 1947 to 1949 he reformed the design of Penguin Books in London, setting standards that shaped post-war publishing. His typeface Sabon (1967) remains in wide use. He died in Locarno in 1974.

The working estate of the typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), digitised by the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum (German Museum of Books and Writing) of the German National Library, in cooperation with the University of Erfurt and funded by the DFG.

All images are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, © Lilo Tschichold-Link. Source and metadata: DNBLab. For high-resolution scans, follow the DNB link on each work page. Titles, metadata and dates are shown as catalogued by the DNB. Of the 2,184 works, 148 carry no creation date and appear under n.d., so the timeline shows only the dated works. Where the dataset records only the digitisation date but the DNB catalogue gives the original work’s year, the catalogue year is used and marked on the work page. For a small number of works a year stated in the title (“Skizzenbuch von 1920”) has been adopted instead; these are marked “inferred from title”. The dating of an artist’s working papers is inherently hazy in places. Where several records share a title and year – typically multiple surviving proofs of the same design – they are numbered (1/2, 2/2) and cross-linked; that numbering is ours, for navigation, and not the museum’s.

This archive is an independent project by Stephen Kelman, a graphic designer in the UK. It is not affiliated with the German National Library or the Tschichold estate.