A Typography of Impoverishment: D.C. McMurtrie’s Reception of European Modernist Typography and an A

Abstract

This paper pries into the disclosures of design history by addressing the question of American modernist typography from the blind side as it were. One possible source of leverage, the one I choose for this brief and modest article, is to simply ask the question: What was the temper of typography in light of an economic and social debacle? That it took a modernist case is significant, therefore the queries raised from the nexus of American modernism and economic depression generates a particular course of inquiry beginning with location — McMurtrie, typography and Chicago.