 I think you'll be patient for me. So, because today I'm going to tell you a story about an absolutely unknown typographer. He has been forgotten for so long that no one knows him at all. Neither today's typographic students, nor the professors, or even their professors, professors. And yet, here I am to present you a new book that we've put together about him. And yes, you can rightly ask, why are you not doing new fonts, or why the hell are you making a book about someone who nobody knows? It's because this typographer was one of the most important figures in Czech typographic history, and he's our base for new fonts. And you know really well that if we Czechs want to show off tradition, we reached first for Wojtek Preizek, who was the first to localize imported typefaces into Czech. Or we literally go for Ladislav Sutnar, who established the rules of new elementary typography and functionalist graphic design. Or we go to Olcich Menhardt, upon whose original manuscript the majority of our tradition stands. However, our type culture has also long been influenced and deeply shaped by one small, modest, passionate and incredibly hardworking man, Jaroslav Bindak. He was an important pillar, who stood at the beginning of our contemporary typographic tradition. But yet, we don't know anything about him. There is no single professional publication about him. Google found only two relevant references. Abe books, nothing. Amazon, also nothing. The letter form archive as well. Wikipedia does not contain a single sentence about him. Who is he then and how is it possible that the world today knows so little about someone for us so important? Over the last years, we found out quite a lot about him. And now the time has come to somehow correct this long-term injustice. So I would like to introduce you, Jaroslav Bindak. Bindak was a remarkably versatile artist. He had no difficulty from moving to one job to the next. This is also why he devoted himself to all type of projects. Like he engraved vodka illustrations. He designed wooden toys. He also designed glass bowls and vases. Hand woven tapestries. He also designed one poster and literally one poster after another. Just the ex-liberals and monograms along came to more than 100 at the beginning of 20th century. But above all, much of his work became crucial, especially for the period of Czech Cubism, which in our environment emerged with Rhonda Cubism. And for the period of Art Deco, which drew from semi-uncial and uncial lettering tradition. These influences combined to create the so-called national style, which is only working for our environment, which was linked with the end of the Great War and the creation of an independent state, Czechoslovakia, for which it was necessary to build a completely new visual language. Bindak frequently seized new artistic opportunities and contributed to the creation of a new identity for the first Czechoslovak Republic. He designed the national flag, produced dozens of ceremonial awards, written addresses, leather boxes, and also calligraphy letters for presidents, and shareholder certificates. And fantastically, he even designed the banners for the so-called movement. Among his most successful works was his design for the state banknote with John Amos Kaminius, which Benda won in an open competition. This is the colors of the final printed banknote. Another success was his design for the first Czechoslovak postage stamps, simply called dopes. Benda's annual Saint Venceslas Golden Ducat coin are the most rare and valuable coins and Czech Ducats until today. In the glow of these successes, Benda joined his colleagues and became the head of a new graphic design studio at UMPRUM Academy in Prague. UMPRUM is a shortcut for our school name. Benda became one of the leaders of a new style called UMPRUMism that took inspiration in the Slavic history and decorativism. The noticeable rounding and decorative character was logically reflected in Benda's designs. He created several this way, for instance, postage and newspaper stamps. Benda was a pretty famous designer at the time. No one could be surprised that he designed also director chains or that he created a new form for the national emblem with the Chaplain. He also created a series of colored glass mosaics, like tons of them, and stone memorial tablets and gilded plaques or cast memorial tablets. He had success abroad as well. His design of the exhibition for Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo in Paris in 1937 brought him his third grand prix. His design of the state emblem for the Leon in an Iron is also worth nothing. After the Second World War, he founded a brand new studio at UMPRUM Academy in Prague for drone and scientific film animation and he participated in several films himself. He also wrote texts and essays about type and published his own memoirs. In short, I would say he did everything and his grandson says of him that he worked even while pissing. So, that's probably true. Yeah, so now you understand head. He impressed us absolutely completely but mostly by drawing consistently unique letterings for all book cover he did. His covers does represent a wide spectrum of the original and unique letter combinations and letter shapes. For years we have been searching and collecting his books, personally restoring and archiving them until we finally created and collected about 250 titles or maybe more or maybe even less. So, with all the mutations of covers and tons of editorial series, we have come to a modest estimate that Benda created more than 1,000 book covers over his lifetime. It's an incredible amount. And that's exactly a solid material, not only for the archive we've managed to establish but also for a nice exhibition that we've organized in April 2018 at UMPRUM Academy in Prague. And what's more, we take this base and collection as to prepare a nice typographic publication about him. This book came to life, oriented purely towards Benda's typography. As was mentioned before, we put the book together by ourselves. We started a few years ago and we searched for, photographed and scanned individual works. We wrote the text, edited it and set it ourselves. To our surprise, it has undergone a peer review by several expert reviewers. We also created a bespoke graphic design that goes hand in hand with the theoretical text. Yes, Benda's versatility would definitely deserve a comprehensive monograph book, but we were much more interested in seeing his completely unmapped, long-term and captivating passion for type and graphic design. The aim of this publication is to introduce Benda as an admirable type designer, an excellent graphic artist and a sensitive book typographer. This book is divided into two parts, the main text and an image catalogue, which maps all of his preserved typographic works. The main text deals essentially with an analysis of Benda's letterings. We have, of course, started to sort them into chapters for which we have used Professor Sopla, classification of typefaces of Latin origin. The same sort is rather used in his manual of diacritics. The Benda book is completely complemented by recollections from his granddaughter and a complete list of his students at the Umprum Academy in Prague. So the main text, printed in the blue images that you are looking at right now, is all about Benda's typography experiments. The first chapter is devoted to sans serif letterings, which he created for nearly 60 years. The earliest designs reflected the art nouveau style. Massive, robust letters were created by carving away gaps between letters in the voodoo cut. An interesting detail is the design of accents, diacritics, which are squeezed in between the characters. When Benda reversed the principle of engraving, he carved the characters directly. He's created a light cubist lettering with a lot of diagonals. The posters decorated with crystalline work are the most typical for this period. Benda found his way toward his own style of grotesque roughly in the 1920s, when, despite his nature, he attempted to create his own reflection on the functionalist lettering. He developed a universal grotesque, which he mastered brilliantly in all kinds and sizes of princess material, like here, post stamps. But amongst Benda's best alphabets ever, are the characters carved into stone or made in glass, which we decided to map out. Probably the most captivating was a trip to Northern in the Netherlands, where the mortuary chapel of John Amos Caminius still stands with a seven semi-transparent edged glass windows and indoor memorial tablets by Benda. This one is a really nice detail of the glass and its lettering. The most common, second most common group of letterings are made up of serif type faces. Benda began drawing these as a reflection of the poor quality of book type faces. He was the one to first draw and design hand-drawn alphabets with a stylistically consistent design of Czech accents. Benda's classical Romans were drawn with a broad-knit pan. They seemed fragile, but left a serious and elegant impression with regard to the titles for which they were drawn. Third and the largest groups of lettering is made up of calligraphic and freely written scripts. Benda was an exceptional calligrapher who practiced for decades. He could control the writing tool with excellent bravura. He used the irregular edges of the strokes to underline the natural beauty of hand-drawn letters. At the same time, the British character of the alphabets of Edward Johnston or Eric Gill is unmistakably imprinted on the scripts of Benda. He also drew simple script type faces for book covers and product packaging, which he often combined with his sans serif type faces. The gradient color is also typical for his late covers. And in the 1930s, he even created advertising writing manuals that were published in Germany. Altogether, the first part of the book concludes with a chapter about how Benda used his hand-drawn type faces on unique book covers. A full-color image catalog makes up the second half of the book. It contains an incredible 554 objects bearing Benda's original type faces, from the smallest X-liberates to the huge marble slabs. This work represents a living specimen of letter forms on which Benda just tested designs of his real typographic alphabets attempts. Yeah. Despite all the work that I mentioned until now, Yaroslav Benda devoted himself primarily to the typeface design. So let's carefully examine all of his typefaces. Benda's first poster typeface was named Manes and it's significant by its accents that became an integral part of a letter. Benda's solution for diacritics was always original. The uniqueness of this design consists in the fact that he cut this typeface himself in two sizes in the bootcut. The print house graphia reproduced the typeface stereotypically and it was received really well by the professional community because this was the first ever alphabet produced entirely in our country from design to implementation. Print house graphia used it for a number of commissions and especially poster laser. The dispositive impulse led Benda to attempt to design the first Czechoslovak book typeface for President Masaryk in 1923. The typeface was to be produced in multiple ways with italics. The order was handled by Prague based stock type foundry and the test punch cutting took place in Leipzig. But the pressed testing did not turn out well. Punch cutters in Bohemia and even in Leipzig weren't able to engrave the typeface. Benda chased away his sadness from the failed implementation with work and he got back to this typeface 12 years later thanks to stock type foundry's editor-in-chief, Metod Kalap, who arranged for Benda to meet Stanley Morrison in Berlin in 1934. Morrison advised Benda to send the sketches of alphabets for punch cutting and metal casting to the monotype corporation in London. Benda completely redrew the typeface and sent the designs to monotype. But this happened just before the bombing of London. It was only in 2013 that it was discovered that the original sketches made their way from monotype's office in the center of London to its archive in Salford, 40 kilometers away from London where they waited out the war. In 2017, we personally visited the archive and saw the designs. Benda's type family is absolutely unique, not only in its original calligraphic strokes, but also by its scale of weight. Creating a related serif and sans serif type family only became a matter of course several years later. We can only guess at the reasons monotype did not produce the typeface after the war. Until his death, Benda was convinced that the designs had been destroyed for good. However, he did not lose all love for creating typefaces. When he received an offer by Czechoslovak Committee, posted on the jury for competition for a new typeface for scientific and technical type setting in 1959, despite his advanced age, he decided to compete and design his own alphabet called 1960. This typeface is loosely based on his design for monotype. Despite it's not completely ready, it was so successful it received that the Czechoslovak Committee attempted to produce it after the competition. Unfortunately, this attempt wasn't successful, too. As part of the corrections and modifications of this typeface, Benda freely worked his way toward the design of his new, last book typeface called Romana and Italca, a complete typefamily for which he guarded experience for his entire career and finished it together with his daughter, Yaroslava, at the age of 80. The Romana and Italca contain all European accents and punctuation. It was intended as a comprehensive book typefamily for setting literature, newspapers, and periodicals. Benda created drawings for Slavsaryf and Sonsaryf, too, and bold versions also. Its range of styles, it's so wide that this typeface could be the biggest typefamily in Czech type history if it would be finished, which is actually not. We de-answered the phototype setting, however, not even this typeface was cast in metal and finished properly. So the sad fact remains that none of Benda's typefaces were ever cut and produced in metal. Benda developed his last typefamily at the age of 80, which shows that his diligence and tenacity were truly exceptional. So now I hope you understand our passion for him slightly. By creating this book that is here, we wanted to bring to light of the day the designs that have been long hidden under a layer of dust. Benda was an influencer with nowadays terms who greatly inspired generations of type designers to come, even without glorification and popularity. And his manuscript is deeply embedded in our Czech DNA. 50 years after his death, he has again become an inspiration to his type. Our book took five years to make. We printed the Czech original of this publication a few days ago in Prague and have brought a couple of copies so you can physically see it. Just catch me or Radek to show you the book. With this presentation, I wanted both all to find out if it makes sense to make an English translation. And I hope you will tell me. So please. If there are those among you who are already interested, we've made at this... It's my domain, so it's the script stickers. Sorry for it, but there is an online form and you can link your email and order a copy of English translation. I would be happy to... And it would be an honor to guide Benda to the world. So thank you for your attention.