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A typographic innovator and designer, Willem Jacob Henri Berend Sandberg (Dutch, 1897–1984) is perhaps best-known today as the pioneering director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum from 1945 to 1963. During the Second World War, Sandberg was a member of the Dutch resistance, who used his knowledge of printing and design to forge identity papers. Toward the end of the war, Sandberg went into hiding from the Gestapo. It was then that he designed the pages that would eventually be published together as Experimenta Typografica II (“II” indicating this later iteration). Between 1943 and 1945, Sandberg collaborated with the Amsterdam printer Frans Duwaer to produce a series of near-unique, collage-like compositions, incorporating drawings, texts, and found materials. He utilized scraps of paper torn from magazines and other recycled sources due to wartime material shortages. Nineteen pamphlets (today in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum) were printed in total in small editions. These share a close physical and conceptual approach to experiments by pioneering printer and designer H. N. Werkman (Dutch, 1882–1945), Sandberg’s close friend and mentor. Sandberg’s pamphlets blurred the lines between the unique and the multiple and paired the raw materiality of the printing press—the tactility of paper, the indexical marks of the press—with fragmentary quotations on art and philosophy by a wide range of thinkers from Le Corbusier to Goethe to Karl Marx. Rearranged and reprinted, these wartime traces form the contents of the postwar compilation, Experimenta Typografica II. The torn letterforms that appear on the front and back covers of the book roughly represent the “e” and “t” of the title. The ambiguity of the “e”—like the ambiguity of the Roman numeral II (two) written like the number 11 (eleven) on the title page—is intentional, allowing for misunderstanding and slippage of meaning. Sandberg compiled his earlier pamphlets to create Experimenta Typografica II in October of 1955, a decade into his tenure at the Stedelijk.
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