The aquiline features of Paul Renner punctuate the chapters of Hyphen Press’s “Paul Renner: the art of typography.” This richly illustrated and methodically constructed work records, with great integrity, Renner’s contribution to modern typography and design. Renner is most often associated with Futura, one of the century’s most popular typefaces. Yet the picture that emerges from Christopher Burke’s text defines a figure whose impact on design, through a mixture of pragmatism and diplomacy, is as profound as it is little understood.
Paul Renner (1878–1956) lived through tumultuous industrial and political change in twentieth-century Germany. He began his career as a “book artist” in Munich and became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, where he spoke on the value of quality in design. He taught with Georg Trump and Jan Tschichold at the printing school in Munich, simultaneously working on the design of the Futura typeface, before being dismissed from his teaching post by the Nazis in 1933. Uncertainty was the foundation on which his entire craft was based.
Renner was born in 1878, one of five sons, and spent his childhood under the control of his theologian father. Although he enjoyed a solid education, he emerged with no clear ideals and felt he inhabited “an artificial world that stood alongside the real one.” Though he had no particular goals in sight, the real world offered Renner sustenance in the form of painting commissions, including landscapes for the magazine Simplicissimus in Munich, where he was to settle with his wife Annie. In 1907 he became a father, and so sought a steady income, beginning as a book designer at Georg Müller Verlag.
Starting with the design of book spines and occasional text illustrations, Renner focused on the search for a balance between typography and illustration. He participated in debates on the utilitarian nature of book design at the Deutscher Werkbund and similar forums. It seems that he had an innate capacity for hard work: in 1913, Müller and Renner oversaw the publication of some 287 new editions. One relative of Renner’s said: “A day when he did nothing, at least read nothing serious, was for him a day sadly lost.”
In 1924, amidst political upheaval, the debate on roman versus gothic reached the crisis point. Renner’s own views on this issue were the result of long periods of research. He recognized the benefits of gothic’s truncated curves in saving space in the setting of lengthy compound words; but against this, he pointed out that gothic script had its origins in courtly printing – designed for luxury and not for everyday use. In conclusion, Renner regarded gothic as a decadence, and its capitals as “monstrosities.” (He refused to accept the necessity of ugliness in design even when it met a practical purpose.)
Renner saw roman as forming the trunk of the family tree of type, with roman capitals as the basis for all future developments in Western letterforms. And on the grounds that minuscules influenced by roman forms could be traced back to Charlemagne, whose empire included the first German Reich, Renner concluded that roman was more German than gothic. Renner created Futura both as a new form of Grotesk and as a means of getting shed some of Germany’s old-fashioned “national dress.” In particular, Renner sought a balance between capitals and lower case more effective than that of Herbert Bayer’s “universal alphabet” – a compass-and-pen typeface in which the capitals led the lowercase rather than being in harmony with it.
Three weights of the original Futura.
Futura’s genesis involved three key figures: Ferdinand Kramer, an architect with whom Renner had collaborated previously; Heinrich Jost, a craftsman at the Bauer type foundry, credited with detailing the face from Renner’s early sketches; and Futura’s patron, Jakob Hegner. Hegner was a champion of publishing books set in roman type at a time when Germany was fascinated by the effect that sans serif and gothic had on its sense of national identity. Burke’s description of Futura’s many iterations, tweakings, and eventual release is written in fastidious detail, supported by revealing illustrations.
Renner’s journey was not without incident. His arrest by the Nazis in 1933 (just a short time after the imprisonment of Jan Tschichold) is outlined here in great detail. Typography was already under scrutiny when a number of slides Renner had prepared for the German exhibit at the fifth Trienniale exhibition in Milan were felt to contain an overwhelming amount of roman type. Renner came under suspicion, and his apartment and offices were searched; but he continued to oppose Nazi philosophies on design and industry. He was released the day after his arrest, following a direct plea to Hitler from Rudolf Hess.
Soon after, and perhaps as a result of Renner’s writings, a universal alphabet was back in favor. The Nazis saw gothic as a barrier to their plans for world domination, and it was outlawed by decree in 1941. Hitler’s belief that the term “Swabacher” was poorly understood by the ordinary German meant that he could issue this diktat without fear of ridicule. Roman type suddenly became “Normalschrift” – normal type. This and similar pronouncements were made with what Burke describes as the Nazis’ “unique brand of logic.”
Following his dismissal from the Munich school, and throughout his later years, Renner wrote and occasionally lectured on design.
This book grew out of postgraduate research undertaken by typographer and typeface designer Christopher Burke at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. During his study, Burke became less interested in Renner’s visual output and concentrated instead on the views expressed in his prolific writings, many available here for the first time in English, and of which a complete bibliography is available here for the first time. There are also numerous examples of Renner’s work, supported by thorough annotation and impeccably reproduced, as might be expected of the excellent Hyphen Press.
“Paul Renner: the art of typography” is an important contribution to our understanding of the craft. In describing Renner’s response to social and political change, Burke has woven the history of the ubiquitous Futura into a powerful narrative, rather than treating Futura as an extraordinary, isolated event. In doing so, Burke redresses the balance, and illumines a comparatively poorly known figure who, through his own work and writings, helped shape a better understanding of type design and its role – subservient or otherwise – in the social milieu.
Good typographic biographies are rare, so inevitably the historians of the craft will devour this book. And yet this is no dusty reference volume: the engaging style in which it is written has much to offer the general reader, and Renner’s ideological struggles, his unsteady passage through political upheaval, his superb work, and a determination to remain true to his beliefs, even at the risk of his liberty, make for fascinating, at times dramatic reading.