Paul Klee was 42 years of age when he took up teaching at bauhaus in Weimar. His „Pedagogic Sktechbook“ was first published in 1925 by Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as volume 2 of the series „bauhausbücher“. From this book Paul Klee’s notion of the arrow ist quoted and made the theme of this artist’s book. The ideas of Klee’s …

„Posito … Gesammelte Makulaturen“ (Posito … Collected Spoils) is a new series of artist’s books created from prints made back in 2010. Then I was into making the artist’s book about Kurt Tucholsky „Mir fehlt ein Wort“ (I’m in Lack of a Word). During the time of researching, reading and printing I had the idea of writing a number of …

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an US-American author and one of the so-called „Fireside Poets“ located in New England. They were very popular writers in their time with people tending to read them by the fireside, hence the name of the group. The writers were, apart from Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russel Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes …

Manarah is an old Arabic word for ‘lighthouse’, a place of light to help those on a voyage find their way. Later the word developed into ‘minaret’ – which is the tower of a mosque. I found out about this a few years ago whilst doing research on this topic. The Swiss populace had just voted not to allow the …

When living in England as a one year overseas student in 1984/85 I had met with the tradition of Remembrance Day for the very first time. I was touched by the way how the consequences of war were dealt with and also by the scale of it. It left me impressed and thoughtful. Years later I came across the folksong …

My Words Come Crashing Down Like Stones. This book is entirely typographic. Also, it is of a very experimental sort of typography. Contrary to that typography originally is supposed to aid and support reading and understanding the text, here typography impedes reading, it disrupts and interferes with understanding. This specific typography wants to make aware of our preoccupations. It wants …

History of Human Rights and their manifold declarations goes back far in time. Documents with ideas of steadfast Human Rights from Mesopotamia are over four millennia old. In the world of ancient Greeks Human Rights were known. However, the then accepted notion as to who was to be seen a Human, thus for whom those so-called Human Rights would apply, …

„I cannot recall just how and when we first met. It must have been during the 1980s, when I was a student at university and he had been dead for almost fifty years.“ This is the opening passage of an article I wrote for issue 32 of „Matrix – A Review for Printers and Bibliophiles“. It was published in 2014, …

When on holidays in Scotland some years ago we went into an antiquarian bookshop where we found “The British Encyclopedia In10 Volumes Illustrated”. It was ever so cheap – for the simple reason that volumes 7 to 10 were missing. Being book lovers we couldn’t resist bying it anyway. It had been published back in 1933. Vol 3 said “CHI-DUN”, …

There is something special to a pen-pal relationship bridging the enormous distance between Germany and Australia. The nations are different in so many aspects, the most obvious of which are climate and history. Both shaped everyday life in the respective locations.  It appears that there is some preconception in the sense that the more distant or farther away something is, …