Hommage till ordbilden

In many ways, Hommage till ordbilden is Anders Hall’s professional testament. Here, words pair up and meet with and against each other (word constellations that have been gathered in a little notebook throughout the years) alongside quotes and more extensive texts that in different ways touch upon Anders Hall’s deep and ardent interest in linguistic, typographic and existential communication.

Anders Hall was active in a time when most of the preparatory work was still made by hand using pen and paper. That is also how Hommage till ordbilden came to be. Anders Hall has done the layout and written each page in the book by hand. As a result of this, there is a 304-page original, which in most part is identical to the now printed volume.

The book Homage till ordbilden is enticing for conventional reading, but it can also be regarded as a kind of test chart of over a hundred different fonts. It is enriched by five poems by the poet Eva Runefelt, dedicated to this book. Anders Hall’s Hommage till ordbilden is an exquisite and wayward example of Swedish book art at its best.

Anders Hall was born in 1936 in Hov, just by Hovs Hallar. In 1953, he moved with his family to Gothenburg where he has lived and worked ever since. At the age of seventeen, Hall began working as a typographer at Gothenburg’s Trade and Maritime Newspaper and already then got an emotional, visual and purely physical relation to the letter and the word – typography as form and mediator. He completed his studies at Grafiska Institutet in Stockholm in 1961 and has since then been working as a graphic designer.