Let's take a trip back in time.
This year on the blog I've been reviewing books about graphic design (here, here) and books of graphic design (here). Today I have a few more in that category, exploring the graphic design of the twentieth century.
Read on for 'art through precision' by M. C. Escher, vintage typography reclaimed, and a hundred years of science fiction illustrations.
Book 1
The graphic work of M C Escher. 1975. Maurits Escher. Translator John E. Brigham.
I was interested in M. C. Escher's work as a child, but haven't thought much about it (beyond one Escher print on my wall) between then and reading this book now. This is a reprint of his 1961 book.
Escher selected and arranged the contents, and wrote the book's introduction (the entirety of its text). In translation, Escher sounds like an old-timey wizard. This isn't helped by him name-dropping his dark arts:
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| Extract from book. "This was in 1946 when I first made the acquaintance of the old and highly respectable black art technique of the mezzotint". |
(Copy Editor Brain never turns off; even in five scant pages of text I noticed the weird paragraph breaks, 'lightening' for 'lightning', etc.)
A remarkable commentary
I want to start with Escher's own explanation of this book.
"Apart from prints 1 to 7 inclusive, all the numbered reproductions in this book were made with a view to communicating a specific line of thought. The ideas that are basic to them often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us."
Escher makes it very clear that his artworks are deliberate visual expressions of specific ideas (these come across as mathematical ideas to the modern viewer/reader, but he shies away from the word). He takes pains to describe how and why each piece develops the idea. So when, for example, he talks about infinity, it's not in a vacuous or emotive way, but in very specific and grounded terms, of nadir and horizon and reduction and proportion and geometry and limits. I've actually never seen art explained so clearly before, and I found it very endearing.
The process of artistry
Escher says he finds as a mature artist that an artwork comes about in two phases. First there is a lengthy, difficult visualisation and numerous attempts to get a detailed concept sketch right. "After this, to my great relief, there dawns the second phase, that is the making of the graphic print; for now the spirit can take its rest while the work is taken over by the hands."
Manual skill has been sublimated and the toughest work that remains is deciding on its application.
It's slightly melancholy to read Escher casually mentioning the secrets of what might as well be lost arts for most people – specifics of woodcut printing, hand-etching mezzoprints, etc – in a way he clearly expects his reader will be familiar with.
So yes this book is absolutely fascinating, for reading as much as viewing.
The commentary also achieved its goal, in helping me understand some Escher works I've seen before but not comprehended (or perhaps only appreciated the artistry without realising there was something to comprehend). For example:
This print explores the use of 2D artworks to denote 3D objects and the fact that there's no true way to experience 2D in our 3D world. Escher depicts three shapes. The first is a sphere. It rests atop the second, a reinterpretation as a 2D form giving the illusion of a sphere, made paper-thin and folded in half to reveal the deception. One of its edges rests (as if it really were the lower half of a sphere) atop the third, another reinterpretation as a 2D image shown in perspective resting on a flat surface.
In summary
A really enjoyable book. I got far more out of it than I expected to.
Also there's a vein of TTRPG inspirations here, e.g.:
When Escher's work enters the public domain in ~2043, it's going to be a huge boon to indie RPG and art zine scenes.
Book 2
Vintage typography & signage. 2018. Frank H. Atkinson, Charles J. Strong, & L. S. Strong.
I've used these reviews to vent about textual errors before. Finally, an exception: this book is completely without typo. How does it accomplish this? It has only a single paragraph of text.
The remaining 120 pages are all dedicated to recreations of various signs, illustrations, and typefaces from the early 1900s.
The original sources are two books, Frank H. Atkinson's Sign Painting (1900) and Strong's Book of Designs (1917). I don't understand why this information isn't given up front in the aforementioned single paragraph of text. The book just says "two rare, early-twentieth-century sources" and relegates the titles to the tiny legal text in the front matter. It feels faintly distasteful. On the other hand, only the three twentieth-century artists are credited (L. S. [Lawrence Stuart] Strong is Charles Strong's son; their Book of Designs is a collaboration).
Most of the examples are in black and white, with a few decorative initials and full page illustrations rendered in colour. Stylistically, the examples are all either 19th-century traditional signwriting or distinctly Art Nouveau.
It was pretty easy to chase down the source texts for comparison: Sign Painting and Strong's Book of Designs are both archived.
In summary
I wonder what the process of cleaning up the originals for republication was like. On the one hand, they certainly appear to be in a smooth modern format. Are they vectorised, manually or with an automatic tool? Or is the publisher having access to the original printing plates sufficient to produce nice crisp copies that you can't get from archives of old original print copies?
I find it notable that no additional artist or author involved in publishing this modern edition is credited. I'd hesitate to call it a cash grab, but this isn't a high-effort book. It's a good resource for works from the specific era. Some of the examples were interesting enough that I've downloaded copies of the original sources from archive.org for inspiration or use.
Book 3
100 years of science fiction illustration. 1975. Anthony Frewin.
The photo above is my battered old copy of this book, often flicked through but never read cover-to-cover. It covers the 1840-1940 period. The writing is quite editorial in tone, with a Britishness that occasionally comes through when cross-examining twentieth century American writings about the state of the art in science fiction.
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| Amazing Stories |
Tracing the origination of science fiction
There's no hard line to be drawn at the start of the SF era, and author Anthony Frewin's choice to begin with the work of Grandville in the 1840s is in a sense arbitrary, especially since the book follows it with a 40-year gap before including the works of Robida.
When tracing the genre's roots and trying to establish when it really became an entire new category, Frewin credits John W. Campbell as having "moulded" all of SF to come. Magazine editor Hugo Gernsback takes some knocks in the process:
"Gernsback (1884-1967) may not have been the 'Father of Science Fiction' as so often has been claimed, but that he made a substantial contribution to the development of the genre no one could deny. To say that he gave SF an almost universal popularity at the cost of castrating its literacy is not far from the truth."
Frewin calls Gernsback's prose "bereft of sensitivity, devoid of humour, pedestrian in the extreme, and evincing enthusiasm for nothing more than the most abject of gadgets".
From the sample included I have to agree Gernsback's writing was unimpressive. It also taught me that in the 1920s we almost settled on the term "scientifiction" instead of "science fiction":
Regarding science fiction artistry specifically, Frewin notes that the work of Frank R. Paul as a magazine cover artist would come to characterise all SF work for "forty years" [1927-1946].
Trends, critiques, and content
Frewin traces the rise of science fiction chronologically, era by era and artist by artist, with an understandable focus on the magazine industry where most of it was happening. He generally doesn't withhold criticism – "The turtle-men are ill-executed and of little consequence" is a great line, doubly so out of context.
He has a number of other bangers, such as referring to 1938 as the year SF technology stops looking like "the inside of a radio set". And on changes in SF and publishing trends: "Today's format is tomorrow's doormat".
For my purposes though, the text was a bit judgey without always having strong explanatory power; I would have preferred more focus on why Frewin thinks some work or other is "insipid".
100 years of science fiction illustration was published in 1975, of course. The editorial tone could have been a lot worse. Instead, Frewin comports himself well, calling out xenophobia, the depredations of war, and narrowness of writers' assumptions.
The book reproduces tons of neat images. There's lot of technical proficiency on display, all with that instantly recognisable twentieth century science fiction feel.
Errors
100 years of science fiction illustration feels a little amateurish in production, perhaps appropriately given so much of its subject matter is about grasping blindly at new concepts. The book layout is odd. The paragraphs have neither indents nor spaces, making it hard to tell where they start. Many paragraphs end in ellipses, for all that the text lightly mocks this practise several times.
The choice of a typeface with fine lines means that when printed white-on-black, commas turn into full stops. For example:
And there are lots of outright mistakes in the copy. Entire repeated lines. Misspellings, often consistent ("canon" and "apocolyptic" throughout). Missing spaces. An arbitrary mixture of italics and quotes for titles, and at least one mis-titled story.
In summary
This book delivers just what you would expect from the premise. I'm not at all well-versed in science fiction history, so it's possible it has omissions, but the text felt comprehensive and thoughtful and the illustrations were very engaging.
Relevance to my 'learn about graphic design' goals
I'm enjoying expanding my art analysis palette. It's good to take a closer, deeper, and more systematic look at types of artwork that feel familiar but only from having seen instances in passing.
Tune in next time for a study in highs and lows when I look at Graphic Design for Dummies!
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