An Exhibition in Vienna in 1951, Walter Zeischegg, Carl Auböck
A book about handle pioneers by Andrea Scholtz
Published in 1995 by: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
ISBN 3-88375-217-7

Since Otl Aicher took FSB by the hand in the mid-1980s and convinced us of the necessity to do more than just design, manufacture and sell door handles, we were called to account by him on a regular basis concerning the homework he had set us.

Thus Otl Aicher also heard about our project by the name of "Ergonomics and Practice", on which we were working together with the REFA (time and motion studies) engineer Johannes J. Solf from Ludwigsburg. We also told him that a dentist had brought a certain Friedrich Herig to our attention, who had written a book named "Better Work with Better Handles".

Otl Aicher was pleasantly surprised. At the beginning of the 1950s, he himself, accompanied by his wife, had paid a visit to the same Friedrich Herig in Rechtenstein near Ulm, however they had not been the only guests at Herig’s institute at the time. There, they had also met a certain Walter Zeischegg, who had just been preparing an exhibition on the subject of “Hands and handles” in Vienna. This exhibition had proved very successful. Later on, Zeischegg had joined him at the Design Academy in Ulm. Aicher suggested then that the works of Herig and Zeischegg might be a great subject for another book in the FSB Edition series.

Many years later, FSB discovered that the organizers of the great exhibition “Hands and Handles“ that took place in Vienna in 1951 had had no funds to print a catalogue. So FSB commissioned the art historian Andrea Scholtz to dedicate a retrospective volume of the FSB Edition to the handle pioneers who had exhibited in Vienna and to the courageous organizers of this exhibition. After a delay of 44 years, this excellent exhibition thus got its catalogue in the end.