Bookbinders: 1961 Documentary Romanticizes Book Craftsmanship

Earlier this week, we took a detour from our intense interest in the evolution of publishing and instead examined its past with a fascinating 1947 documentary on making books. Today, we’re back with some excellent companion viewing: The 1961 documentary Bookbinders, part of the America at Work series by the AFL-CIO, which frames the book production process with enough romanticism to make today’s most notorious “better-nevers” nod along like the bobblehead dogs on the dashboard of a New York cabbie.

Americans at work, in an art that is the preservation of all arts: The making of books. These men are masters of their tools, from the most primitive instruments to the latest equipments of the machine age. With other craftsmen, these are the people who make the pen mightier than the sword.”

For a richer celebration of this vanishing craft, we highly recommend Lark’s 500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form.

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Gerd Artnz Graphic Designer: The Visual Legacy of 4,000 Symbols

It’s been a great month for Isotype, the vintage pictogram language that gave rise to much of today’s visual communication and sparked the infographics revolution. Yesterday, we featured the story of Otto Neurath, considered the father of Isotype, and last week we raved about the ace iPhone app testing your memory through pictograms by Gerd Arntz (1900-1988), the politically engaged Modernist German graphic designer who collaborated with Neurath on the invention of Isotype.

Today we turn to Gerd Arntz Graphic Designer — an absolutely fantastic recent book about Arntz’s work, exploring the 4000 symbol signs he designed in his lifetime and their visual legacy.

Best-known for his iconic black-and-white wood and linoleum cuts, Arntz also created an astounding array of Isotype color icons spanning nature, industry, people, architecture, mobility, food and more.

And here’s something we found wildly interesting, a living testament to the iconic designer’s cultural footprint: Does the F in this Arntz logo look familiar?

A major case of Similarities, it seems, and proof that everything does indeed build on what came before.

Beautifully designed and thoughtfully written, Gerd Arntz Graphic Designer is both a treasure trove of Isotypes and a priceless overview of the system, its political and historical context, and its timeless design legacy.

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How a Book is Made, Circa 1947

2011 is barely underway and it’s already been a tumultuous year for the evolution of publishing. As entire industries struggle to plot the future of the book, we find it important to take a step back and take a look at its past. An 8-bit unicorn tipped us off to the priceless 1947 documentary Making Books — a joint effort of Encyclopedia Britannica Films and the Library of Congress that will make you gasp and wince and gasp again as it opens its treasure chest of retro technology, matter-of-factly industrialism and unwitting vintage sexism. (Alnd cue in omnibus of short films about obsolete occupations.)

This man is an author. He writes stories. He has just finished writing a story. He thinks many people will like to read it. So, he must have this story made into a book. Let’s see how the book is made.”

While we aren’t ones to romanticize the wonders of yore, there’s something to be said for the kind of craftsmanship that we lose, or at the very least dramatically alter, as we substitute the digital page for the printed one. We also have to wonder about the lens of delightful quaintness with which tomorrow’s historians and media scholars will tell the story of, say, designing for the iPad reading experience.

via Dead SULs

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Soviet Artist and Mathematician Anatolii Fomenko’s Mathematical Impressions

What Soviet science has to do with German Expressionism and the logic of intuition.

We love the convergence of mathematics and the visual arts. (Previously: Robin Moore’s string math portraits; Vi Hart’s Flatland on a Möbius strip; Kevin van Aelst’s food visualizations of scientific concepts.) Today, we turn to Mathematical Impressions — the incredible illustrations of Soviet mathematician Anatolii Fomenko, exploring the intersection of mathematics and the myth of light geometry.

Since the 1970s, Fomenko has produced more than 280 illustrations, 84 of which — 61 black-and-white and 23 color — are collected in this remarkable anthology. Alongside the images are Fomenko’s original captions, illuminating both the inspiration for the artwork and the historical subtexts for it.

One can consider these images to be photographs of a strange, powerful, and fantastic mathematical world—one that exists, regardless of how we perceive it, according to its own special laws.” ~ Anatolii Fomenko

Originally published 21 years ago, Mathematical Impressions is an incredible intersection of logic and intuition, part Escher, part German Expressionism, part something else entirely.

via But Does It Float

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