This is the story of Marleen who falls in love with the world of lettering before she has even learned to read. Born into a family of successful advertisers and illustrators, she grows up dreaming of a truly great invention: the perfect font for everybody.

This novel digs deeply into the history of modern typography, how it was practised, taught and reinvented a few times over. Marleen, a dyslexic child having abandoned her Catholic faith, flees her flashy broken home as she turns nineteen. Her journey's stops mark her education within a craft which sometimes resembles a cult. In Paris, Swiss genius type designer Titus Passeraub opens up the professional field for the ambitious but slightly melancholic German lady. He thinks of her as a perfect assistant. Marleen begins to realize that her idea of some perfect type is not far from having to reinvent the wheel again. Instead, the new digital tools must be fed with intelligent programs for the global practitioner of lettering which will be a layman - the consumer. At the end of the novel, then in New York, she asks herself: If this is the task of the future, which is the way out?

Ziegler's novel Nothing White depicts a generation for whom the introduction of the personal computer goes parallel and cannot be separated from their own coming of age. Incisive, sophisticated and brilliant.

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