Fig. 1) Imre Kner, book cover composed of typographic elements, 1907. Due to a number of publications and exhibitions, we have learned a good deal in recent years about the Hungarian avantgarde. Names like Lajos Kassak and Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy are internationally known, but we know considerably less about other Hungarian artists and designers. Of these, one of the most important is Imre Kner, who is primarily responsible for the revival of Hungarian printing beginning in the early 1920s. Kner was born a hundred years ago, on February 3, 1890, in Gyoma, where his father, Izidor Kner, a very poor but talented young man, set up a one-man printing shop in 1882. Gyoma was a small Hungarian market town which at the most agricultural traditions but was very far from all forms of bourgeois culture that would have ensured the existence of a printing house. At the time of Imre Kner's birth, his father's printing shop only a few employees, but by 1904, when his father sent him to Leipzig to study, the shop was already operating in a new building with modern machines and more than one hundred workers. All this was the result of Izidor Kner's outstanding ability, sense of quality, and up-to-date knowledge of printing. As a student in the Julius M'aser Technikum fur Buchdrucker, the 14-year-old Imre not only learned printing technology but also studied typographical design in the spirit of the Jugendstil, which spread its tendrils everywhere by that time. Imre proved to be a talented designer and also drew, modeled, and showed a passionate interest in all branches of the arts. On his return home, at the age of 17, he became the artistic and technical manager of his father's printing house, as well as the designer of numerous books and printed materials (figure 1). Imre was attracted to the progressive trend of the artists grouped in the German Werkbund, especially the new approach to design adopted by Peter Behrens in architecture, products, and graphics. Imre became more and more convinced that Hungarian book printing was in a deep crisis because the industrial revolution, which occurred in Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century, had broken the personal bond