Walter Plata

Walter Plata (born May 13, 1925 in Arys ( Masuria ); † March 31, 2005 in Hildesheim ) was a German typesetter and typographer .

education

After graduating from high school in 1948 and an abandoned newspaper traineeship, Plata became a typesetter, and from 1951 worked as a typesetter and typographer in Switzerland, France, Sweden and England.

Profession and calling

From 1958 Plata designed the publications of the typesetting workshop of the Bauer foundry in Frankfurt am Main and headed the "Galerie bg", the first German gallery dedicated exclusively to typography and international graphic design. During this time, Plata developed his typical “handwriting”. It was, as it was called in the obituary of the Federation for German Writing and Language (there he was an honorary member and initiator of the “Stiftung Deutsche Schrift”), “sensational”; because “no one forgets his concise work who has seen it”.

For the Bauer foundry , Plata, who spoke five languages ​​(German, English, French, Swedish, Spanish) so fluently that he was able to give specialist lectures, was also responsible as a “traveler in good typography” for worldwide customer care .

In a scientific study A Study of Newspaper Design he later named Konrad F. Bauer , Jan Tschichold , Beatrice Warde , Stanley Morison and Alexander Nesbitt (Rhode Island School of Design, where Plata was an "Assistant Professor" for Nesbitt for a few years) as his teachers to whom he dedicated the book.

In 1969 he took a leave of absence from the Bauer foundry and went to Kenya as a development worker , where he helped set up the first school for design at a black African university at the University of Nairobi and ran it from 1973 to 1975. However, the faculty was dissolved again a short time after the development workers left.

Plata has worked for numerous publishing houses and printers in Europe, Africa, Asia and America, including the European Publishing House and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He wrote over 200 specialist articles and gave lectures on all continents, including on behalf of the Goethe Institute , for example in India, Singapore and Japan.

Plata advocated good traditional typography and fonts in fonts and through application in practice, especially the use of traditional broken fonts such as Textura , Schwabacher and Fraktur . In 1984, for example, he set the book Johann Sebastian Bach for his birthday , published in his own publishing house in Hildesheim, the Plata-Presse , from front to back by hand, partly in the 14 point Dürer fracture of the monotype , which was last cast from the original matrices especially for this print , which (only) in this cut (14 point) was his preferred broken script alongside the Zentenar Fraktur by Ernst Schneidler .

Books designed by Walter Plata have received several awards from the Book Art Foundation. In 1968 he and his long-time friend Hans Peter Willberg applied to be the Foundation's managing director; Willberg, who is better connected in the Frankfurt and Mainz scene, made the race. A few years later, Plata became a juror for the foundation, but in the 1990s he reported to his student Hans Michael Hensel of “sobering experiences” and described the foundation's awarding of the award as “haggling”, which sometimes went according to the motto “Give something to my favorite "Then I will also vote for yours" and the possibility of honoring beautiful and exemplary, reader-friendly books, too often for the sake of effect.

A plea for broken scriptures

Plata's particular concern was to show how to use good old fonts in a modern way. “He never made a page that even remotely looks yesterday, as you see it again and again - to the detriment of the beautiful writings.” (HM Hensel) Plata passionately contradicted the thesis of his friend Hans Peter Willberg “The Nazis have them Fraktur destroyed. ”In a public discussion with him, Plata said that one shouldn't complain about the alleged destruction of a typeface, but rather that good typeface should be revived through good design, instead of, as has happened, the typographer contributing to Albert Kapr's book about Fraktur almost exclusively in a “space-saving newspaper” and already had the topic “killed” on the cover with the sentence “younger people cannot read Fraktur”. In this way, said Plata, one becomes the gravedigger of this writing: “Whether Fraktur will still be read in the future also depends on good design. We typographers are jointly responsible for this. "(Source: Die deutsche Schrift 2/2005)

Private life

During his stay in Kenya, Plata married the Pakeeka designer Labeeka (called "Yasmin") Khan, with whom he also organized joint exhibitions ("Plata-Plata"). The marriage with Yasmin failed after returning to Germany in 1975, when Plata taught graphic design first in Aachen and later in Hildesheim as a university professor. Yasmin gave up the design and went to Canada, where he became a librarian. For almost 25 years until his death, Plata lived in Hildesheim with the actress Anette Lauenstein (mother of the filmmakers Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein ).

In Hildesheim, Plata taught graphic design at the technical college and founded a publishing house for bibliophile print products , the Plata-Presse. He worked with the printer and publisher Manfred Oppermann (* April 7, 1937, † November 28, 2012) together. His printing house, founded in 1901 and in the third generation, had saved a large inventory of historical writings about the war, a treasure trove for Plata. For almost 20 years, Plata designed all of Oppermann's prints that were not purely commissioned work. In return, he had a “free hand” in making use of all the possibilities of the print shop. He made ample use of this. In 2003 Oppermann sold his entire inventory of historical lead type to the printing workshop of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz .

Plata collected Japanese and Chinese calligraphy , Indian Kalamkari and typographically exemplary German posters, printed matter and books with a passion . Among other things, in the 1970s he had acquired almost the entire inventory of the library of the teaching typesetting of the former Bauer foundry in Frankfurt.

In 1996, Plata handed over a large collection of typographic specialist literature and his own works on permanent loan from the library of the University of Hildesheim . He bequeathed his estate to his last student (since 1998), Hans Michael Hensel, who works as a typographer under the pseudonym "John Lesney". Already seriously ill with Parkinson's, he designed his last printed works in collaboration with him, for example some chapters of the return of beautiful writing (2002) and the Hildesheim rose calendar 2003. Walter Plata was buried in the cemetery in Zweifall , where he was teaching at the technical college Aachen had lived with his only sister Gisela (married Olesen).

Publications (selection)

• The Cat's Meow . Frankfurt: Bauersche Foundry 1961.
• "The Present Status of Black Letter in German-speaking Countries." - Alphabet 1964. London 1963.
• “Too rare typography. Typesetting and writing. 6th episode. “- The Polygraph Issue 16. Frankfurt a. M. 1967.
• "For Gothic, Schwabacher and Fraktur in the German-speaking area in the second half of the 20th century." - Philobiblon booklet 4. Hamburg 1968.
• "Visual Communication. Uelezaji kwa njia ya kuangalia. ”- University Bulletin No. 3. (special issue). Nairobi: University of Nairobi 1971.
• A Study of Newspaper Design . Nairobi: University of Nairobi 1974. (Second edition Hildesheim: Plata-Presse 1982.)
• Typography treasures. Broken Fonts. Gothic, Schwabacher and Fraktur in the German-speaking area in the second half of the 20th century. Information and opinions from 17 authors suggested and introduced by Walter Plata . Frankfurt am Main: Polygraph-Verlag 1968. (Second edition as Fraktur, Gotisch, Schwabacher timelessly beautiful. Dates, opinions, information, confessions . Hildesheim: Plata-Presse 1982.)
• "Tiemann? Who is this? About responsibility, dignity, achievement when looking at the work of Walter Tieman. ”- The German publication Heft 65. Lippstadt 1981.
• “About legibility and legibility.” - The German script, Heft 68. Frankfurt a. M. 1983.
• Our daily texts . Hildesheim: Plata-Presse 1984.
• Johann Sebastian Bach for his birthday . Hildesheim: Plata-Presse 1984.
• German typography. Impoverished in a free Europe? Sick in the 21st Century? Hanover: Federation for German Writing and Language 1991.

literature

• [Klaus Grüner:] “Giving shape. Walter Plata: The typesetter and typographer would have turned 80 on May 13th. ”- Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels May 19, 2005.
• Hans Michael Hensel: “Walter Plata. To the death of our honorary member “- Die deutsche Schrift 2/2005 (174th episode, 72nd year). Hanover 2005, 4-7.
• Hans Michael Hensel: “Manfred Oppermann. On the death of the Hildesheim printer and publisher “ - Die deutsche Schrift 1/2013 (185th episode, 80th year). Hanover 2013, 22 f.
• Dirk Kemper [ed.]: "Walter Plata" - Hildesheim Literature Lexicon from 1800 to today. Hildesheim: Olms 1996.
• John Lesney [ed.]: Features No. 7. The return of beautiful writing. Segnitz near Würzburg: Zenos Verlag 2002. ISBN 3-931018-83-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Plata in the catalog of the German National Library
• Plata collection in the library of the University of Hildesheim
• The "Swiss sword" from Hildesheim. Citizens of the world and patrons. (On the death of the printer and publisher Manfred Oppermann and his collaboration with Walter Plata.)