In one particular passage, Phaedrus assigns his class a broad, straightforward task – to write an essay on an aspect of the United States – and becomes preoccupied with one particular girl who, despite a reputation for being serious and hardworking, is in a state of perpetual crisis through not being able to think of “anything to say.” He obliquely recognizes in her block something of his own paralysis in not being able to think of “anything to say” back to her by way of advice, and is baffled by his own eventual stroke of insight: “Narrow it down to one street.” This advice doesn’t work either, but after subsequently suggesting, “Narrow it down further to one building,” then out of sheer frustration “one brick,” something gives and the student produces a long, substantial essay about the front of the local opera house. From this unwitting experiment Phaedrus reasons that she was blocked by the expectation that she ought to be repeating something already stated elsewhere, and that she was freed by the comic extremity of his suggestion to write about a single brick – for which there was no obvious precedent, therefore no right or wrong way to go about it, and therefore no phantom standard to have to measure up to. By this curious yet perfectly logical method, the student was liberated to see for herself, and to act independently. He performs variations on the exercise with the rest of his class – ”Write about the back of your thumb for an hour” – which yield similar results, and lead him to conclude that this implied expectation of imitation is the real barrier to free engagement, active participation and actual learning.

A few similar scenes of fraught but instructive trial and error conclude with his arrival at “quality,” the cornerstone of the book’s subtitle, “an inquiry into values.” Through a series of simple exercises he first proves to the class that they independently recognize quality, because they routinely make basic quality judgements themselves. Then he assigns the question “What is quality?” and counters their angry response that he should be telling them, not the other way round, by simply admitting that he has no idea and genuinely hoped someone might come up with a good answer. A few days later, however, he does work out a kind of self-annulling definition to the effect that, because quality is essentially characterized by a non-thinking process, and because – conversely – definitions are the product of formal thinking, quality can not be defined. This leads him to respond to the eternal student question, “How do I make quality?” with “It doesn’t matter how as long as it is quality!” and to the response, “But how will I know it is?” with “Because you’ll just see it – you just proved to me you can make judgements.” In other words, the students were forced to form their own opinions based on their own inherent sense of quality – and “it was just exactly this he concludes, “that taught [them] to write.”

But school won’t teach you everything and in the end this encouraged us to continue as autodidacts and keep on learning after graduation. We soon enough discovered that this would also be quite necessary if we were to complete client work in time. Having knowledge of the typographic tools and features of InDesign and some basic ideas of how to construct a page layout and typeset it turned out to be quite vital. We realized that having the technical confidence needed to develop and execute our ideas (or just get the job done) was more important than any rights and wrongs of typography.

All that to say, the book we’ve had most use of for our print work is Book Typography: A Designer's Manual by Michael Mitchell & Susan Wightman. A manual not particularly authoritative or aesthetically exciting, but quite exhaustive and always a great starting point when in doubt.

Compiled by graphic designers Marius van Leeuwen and Nel Punt (both mid-1970s graduates from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie), and including essays by renowned Dutch journalist H.J.A. (Henk) Hofland (1927–2016), the paperback features a huge collection of activist posters, pulled from different sources: feminist factions, anti-war organizations, anti-apartheid committees, the early squat subculture, ecological alliances, political parties, the Provo movement, anonymous art collectives, and many other groups and tendencies.

From the pages, a vibrant image of the Netherlands emerges: a country bristling with restless political energy, and artistic urgency – equal parts Pop-Art and Agit-Prop. A mythical country perhaps, one that certainly doesn’t exist anymore, which certainly triggers a pang of sadness – but still, browsing through the book, one cannot help but feel energized, even hopeful.

What’s particularly interesting is the fact that the book was published within the context of a large-scale promotional campaign. The publication was released as the ‘Book of the Month’ by the CPNB (‘Collective Propaganda of the Dutch Book’, the advertising arm of the publishing industry), which meant that copies of the book were widely distributed, and could be found everywhere – in schools, colleges, public libraries, etc. For many school kids, this book was their first encounter with Provos, squatters, and radical politics in general.

In fact, the book is still very easy to be found – at local second-hand-book markets, copies are ubiquitous, almost impossible to avoid. It’s a publication that will forever circulate in the Dutch collective consciousness, for decades to come – and rightly so.