In 1923, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy began devising the Bauhaus’s most ambitious publishing project: the Bauhausbücher, or Bauhaus Books series.

The fourteen volumes issued between 1925 and 1930 served to condense and deliver Bauhaus pedagogy to a wider audience, as well as to make connections with allied avant-garde movements and like-minded artists, such as Kazimir Malevich’s suprematism and Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg’s de Stijl. Within the Bauhaus’s fluctuating history, the Bauhausbücher are an exceptional example of consistency and unity, with most cover designs and layouts executed by Moholy-Nagy, and all published in both paperback and hardcover in a similar size by one publisher, Albert Langen.

December of 1926 saw the advent of the school’s other serial publication: bauhaus magazine. While the Bauhaus Books collected the instructors’ most essential ideas for posterity, the quarterly magazine kept a global readership up to date on happenings at the school, the aesthetic and ideological debates of its time, and the cutting-edge products of industrial design—from lamps and tea sets to furniture and wallpapers—developed in its workshops and sold to the public. Heavily illustrated with photographs (many by gifted photographer Lucia Moholy, the first wife of László Moholy-Nagy), bauhaus is possibly the richest primary source for understanding the school during some of its most vigorous years. Its changing format, design, and typography also track the successive tenures of the three major Bauhaus typographers: László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and Joost Schmidt.

Walkthrough

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