Die Musik des Zufalls by Paul Auster

Die Musik des Zufalls is the German title of The Music of Chance, a 1990 novel by Paul Auster, translated by Werner Schmitz and published by Rowohlt in 1992. A paperback edition followed a year later in their rororo imprint. Walter Hellmann designed the dust jacket and, with different colors but the same type treatment, the paperback cover. Especially the latter (shown below) was and is ubiquitous; in the 1990s on bookshelves of friends and family, and now on flea markets – Auster is particularly popular in Germany and France, where his sales figures are higher than in the United States.

The playful yet precise typography that picks up the theme of chance made a lasting impression on me. It might have been my first consciously perceived example of alternating glyph styles that does not fall in the category of ransom notes, but rather is very carefully composed. The instruments in this typographic étude are Bodoni in upright and italic styles, plus Poster Bodoni Compressed and Avenir for the initial caps.

Paul Auster died this week at the age of 77. You can watch an interview conducted by Kasper Bech Dyg in 2014 in which Auster shares the story of how he became a writer and how he works.