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Three examples of stamp sets commemorating the1972 Olympic games:
an Australian set produced for the summer games at Munich; one from the USA for the same games; and a German set publicising the subsequent winter games at Sapporo in Japan.
The pictogram used on the USA stamp is part of Otl Aicher's famous set, but I don't recognise the ones used on the Australian stamps. They appear to be half-way between the 1964 Tokyo pictograms and Aicher's work, but I don't have information about the designers of any of these sets, and would be glad to find out if anybody does know.
Mid-year resolution: start posting again. Make them shorter. Make them more frequent. Picked up this nice Germano Facetti Penguin in a West country charity shop last week. Great integration of the front and back covers.
Another junk shop find, this book dates from 1974. Strange how we once saw these stark, forbidding, monolinear landscapes as presages of a dystopian future. Now they seem more like the daubings of aboriginal songlines; the first flickerings of an intelligence in its nascent state.
Some of the work here is two dimensional pattern-making, or directed to a specific end, such as the attempt at an American flag shown above, but in the bulk of the book the overriding mood is one of absence; of the missing observer.
Many of the graphics are enclosed by a wireframe 'room', a construction of undefinable dread which calls to mind Giorgio de Chirico's pregnant landscapes, forever frozen at the point of breach.
Who is the shadowy observer? In the final analysis we know it to be ourselves, and our existential anguish comes from the knowledge that we can never step beyond this point, however far we recede. The great Guy Bourdin knew this, and explored the theme often in his photography. That he frequently did it under the guise of the fashion shoot shows that personal vision and commercial work need not be mutually exclusive.
My first post in some time (sorry, deadlines intervened) was inspired by the excellent book 'Bauhaus, Modernism & the Illustrated Book', by Alan Bartram, and is a very brief sample of the impact of modernism on the mass market in Britain, as shown through some paperbacks in my collection.
At the top you can see the front and back of the 'Pocket Pal'. This is the first British edition of the well known US industry guide, and you can see the influence of American modernism instantly. The repeat pattern is redolent of US TV idents of the time, but the typography is not fully resolved, and things only get more confused inside, where contemporary modernist faces (Univers, Grot 215/216) are dropped into a grid free layout and mixed with a seemingly random assortment of serifs. It looks to be the case that you could often have a fairly free hand regarding cover design, but that too often designers specifying layouts and faces came up against intransigent union practises.
The second book here is a Zenith paperback which shows a masterly control of colour, typography and composition. It looks to have been influenced by the famous Penguin grid system, but that is no detraction of the designer's achievement. Again, there seems something of a disconnection between cover and contents (I'm afraid you'll have to take my word on this, as to scan these pages would mean breaking the spines). The Big Slump is set full-width justified in a standard book serif, with the only concession to the cover being Helvetica sub heads and a curious and not altogether successful full-width caption style, set ranged left in Helvetica Bold with a ranged right first line.
Talking of Penguin, I picked up this wonderful 1965 encyclopedia from a charity shop the other day. It comes from the tenure of the great Germano Facetti as art director (see more of his work here http://books.guardian.co.uk/pictures/0,,1752252,00.html) and seems to anticipate the pop modernism to come by several years.
Also here is Facetti's take on every art student's favourite brief: nineteen eighty-four. I love this cover for its capturing of a particular era: in its almost comic-book mark making it displays a character often (though arguably intentionally) missing from modernist design.
As I get older I find myself increasingly drawn to the re-investigation of fondly remembered books and objects. Often the actuality falls far short of the memory, but I was delighted to find the 1972 Guinness Book of Records in a car boot sale last summer, for it is every bit as beguiling as I remember it.
This was one of my grandfather's books, and along with a fascinating set of encyclopedias it was my favourite choice from his shelf. So how do you engage the interest of a child with what is essentially a book of lists? You do it with exquisite Illustration, sensitive layout skills and wonderful draughtsmanship.
The colophon credits layout and Illustration to one Denzil Reeves, whom I've found passing reference to on the web but no biography (if you know more, please tell). His calligraphic skills are excellent—the cover type and frontispiece are hand drawn—but nevertheless this is a curious book. Illustrated title pages evoke the conventions of illuminated manuscripts, but at the same time it is a wholly modernist construction.
The clarity of the book comes from the deceptively simple grid and typography. Large titles are in Clarendon, while the main body is set in a text serif (a little too small to identify), with captioning in Helvetica. The grid is eight column, with two columns of body text and two thin columns which hold both captions and hanging sub heads. Pictures are black and white, but every chapter uses a different spot ink, out of which the Illustrations are often knocked out. Tables are clearly set, and no page ever feels over dense.
One of the things which occupied me longest about this book as a child was the cover, which is a masterpiece of playfulness. It's a rendering of an antique shop, populated with items from the book itself. The rear cover reproduces the view, but from behind the glass, enclosing in a good natured piece of trompe l'oeil a book which is to my mind a masterpiece of popular art. As the Guinness bottle in the window is labelled, priceless…
Are you being sexually aroused by this picture? If your first thought is "No, it's a vodka and tonic", Wilson Bryan Key would beg to differ.
This magnificently unhinged book once occupied far too much of our time as art students, examining Ritz Crackers for the word 'sex' baked into them and scrutinizing drinks ads for messages airbrushed on the ice cubes. All absolute rubbish of course, which credited ad-men with access to a cabalistic insight into human nature denied us ordinary mortals, but it's a fascinating comment on the times that a book like this could become the runaway success it did.
For the cold war generation raised on 'Manchurian Candidate'-style myths of Soviet brainwashing, the new savvy advertising bred suspicion. Too much marijuana and an almost pathological hatred of 'the man' made it but a small step for bedsit philosophers who found hidden messages in The Beatles' 'Abbey Road' to find them in whisky ads too. This was the year of 'The Parallax View', and also of 'A Clockwork Orange', so 'Subliminal Seduction' was by no means an aberration.
Key's book followed on from Lance Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders', but 'SS' took the idea of subliminal messages to its ludicrous conclusion. If you come across a copy it's well worth picking up, if only to relish the dodgy post-Freudian pop psychology and sample the almost palpable mood of post 60s comedown.
Three examples of stamp sets commemorating the1972 Olympic games: an Australian set produced for the summer games at Munich; one from the USA for the same games; and a German set publicising the subsequent winter games at Sapporo in Japan.
