This exhibition in Leipzig of 1920s-30s Czech book design was one of my favorites in recent years. The title “Circus at the Print Shop” comes from a quote from one of the printers in Prague in the 1920s where he was describing the chaos at the printing plants that was caused by the unprecedented avant-garde layouts of type and images. They were so uncoventional and technically difficult to produce with the printing technology of the time, they caused a “circus at the printing press”, in the printer’s words. “The typesetter ran around the entire print shop from one typecase to the next, so as to comply with the designer’s directions.”
This was at the German National Library, which is not in Berlin as you would expect but pointlessly split between Leipzig and Frankfurt, which are on opposite sides of the country. No, they don’t have one of each book in each library. Everything’s just divided up in some way that benefits no one. No library in Berlin puts on exhibitions or displays except there is one museum whose library occasionally does.