For over fifty years, the Type Directors Club has encouraged the worldwide graphic arts community to achieve excellence in typography through its annual international competitions. Typography 31 is the only annual devoted exclusively to typography and presents the finest work in this field for the year 2009. Selected from approximately 2300 international submissions to the annual Type Directors Club competition, the winning designs are models of excellence and innovation in the use of type design, encompassing a wide range of categories, including books, magazines, corporate identities, logo types, stationery, annual reports, video and web graphics, and posters.

Each year, the Type Directors Club selects a prominent design studio or designer for the latest Typography book, which showcases the winners of their annual typography competition. Tremendous creative freedom is given to each studio, which is why this annual book evolves and varies from year to year.

The designer of Typography 31 is Paul Sahre. Paul is a well-known graphic designer, illustrator, educator, author and former World Graphic Design Foosball Champion. Paul established his New York studio in 1997. The balance he strikes between commercial and personal projects is evident in the physical layout of his workspace: part design studio, part silkscreen lab, part classroom. In one room he designs and prints posters (some now in the permanent collection at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) for various off-off Broadway theaters, while in the other room he is busy designing book covers for authors such as Rick Moody, Chuck Klosterman, Ben Marcus and Victor Pelevin.

Paul received his BFA and MFA in graphic design from Kent State and teaches graphic design at the School of Visual Arts. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Op-Ed page, a member of Alliance Graphic International, and the author of Leisurama Now: The Beach House for Everyone, 1964-, a loving look at a short-lived product of early '60s consumer optimism: affordable middle-class summer homes.