skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.
Okay, first let's state the obvious: the typography was never going to win any awards, and the Illustration is just comical – I've never seen a tamer pair of rats than the two menacing that bandaged hand. But for all that something made me pick up this twin cassette pack, and then buy it, despite not having owned a tape player for some years. Why? Partly nostalgia for a certain strain of naive and lurid packaging I suppose, but also because, for all its naivety, this box has an excellent feel to it. The heft is just right, the cases are firmly attached to the outer, and the whole thing opens and falls flat in a most satisfying manner. Having handled some music packaging recently where the design was fine but the materials were sadly lacking, this little case reinforced how important such decisions are. I think that observation is sufficient to qualify 'Tales of Horror' as inspirational.
As promised, here is more of Fact:, the political magazine produced by Herb Lubalin and Ralph Ginzburg before they brought us Eros and Avant Garde. The typography was always austere, always authoritative—and, like the serious newspapers of the day—always black and white. Where Ginzburg departed from the newspaper editors of the day however, was in his willingness to run scandalous and outright libellous headlines, as here, in his outspoken attack on Bobby Kennedy. This issue came out in August 1964. By November Bobby's brother would be dead and such a headline would be unthinkable, as millions pinned their hopes to a young man who would himself fall to an assassin's bullet before the decade was out.
The back cover was used interchangeably, sometimes for small ads, sometimes as a contents page or sometimes as a longer issue flag, to highlight more stories. Two versions are shown here.
