Brief description

A leather-bound booklet of unbelievable smallness features the most beautiful colour letter pictures by the world-famous typography artist Josua Reichert. The wonderful creations were printed on lightweight paper and bound in leather in delicate handwork to form the world's smallest book ever produced in edition printing. The alphabet can only be seen with a magnifying glass, which is kept together with the book in a teakwood box.

Author portrait

Josua Reichert, born in Stuttgart in 1937, is a printer, typographer, graphic designer and author who lives and works in Haidholzen (municipality of Stephanskirchen) near Rosenheim. In 1956/57, Reichert began his career in a print shop. In 1959 he studied with Professor HAP Grieshaber at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. In 1960 Reichert set up his first studio in Stuttgart, which he moved to Munich a year later. In 1970 he took on a guest lectureship at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Finally, from 1972, he had a studio in Stephanskirchen/Simsee in Upper Bavaria.

Josua Reichert received several scholarships, for example a scholarship from the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation for the Promotion of the Humanities in 1964 and two years later a scholarship from the Kulturkreis im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie. He has also been awarded numerous art prizes, including the São Paulo Biennial Prize in 1967, the Antiquaria Prize Ludwigsburg in 1999 and the Jerg Ratgeb Prize in 2010, which is funded by the HAP Grieshaber Foundation and is associated with an exhibition in the Spendhaus Municipal Art Museum of the City of Reutlingen.

Work

Reichert is considered the most important contemporary European artist in the field of typography. For him, the letter, the alphabet, the word, the poem are pictorial carriers of messages. Most of the colour-intensive, strictly constructed text and type images do not exclude the free play with forms. The term "poesia typographica" encompasses both a group of works and Reichert's entire activity, which also includes stamp prints, collages, broadsides, "Der Haidholzer Psalter", hand prints, type pictures (the most extensive of the groups of works) as well as portfolio works, codices, books, folding sheets. Many printing forms are rubbed directly onto the image carrier with a spoon as a tool. The group of posters provides biographical information as a guide to the exhibitions. The catalogue of works lists over 800 items. Particularly with his numerous works for public buildings, the artist attempts to introduce an enlightened poetic into everyday life.