As for design, in the nineteenth century a page of text was
routinely set as a tightly leaded block, sometimes relieved by an initial cap
or spot illumination. Picture and alphabet books, though graphically more
exciting, were nonetheless typographically subdued to avoid distracting the
child. For a brief period during the 1920 s children’s books were transformed
by the modern revolution. Lazar El Lissitzky’s suprematist classic,Of Two
Squares(designed in Vitebsk in 1920 but first published in Berlin in 1922 ),
which was based on his famous political poster,Beat the Whites with the Red
Wedge,was the first break from traditional children’s layout and content.
According to N. Khadzhiev in a 1962 essay “El Lissitzky Book Designer”
(reprinted in El Lissitzky, Thames and Hudson, 1968 ), it was the first time
that the artist applied the revolutionary typographic language that he would
later use in adult-oriented ads and brochures.Of Two Squaresused only
symbolic abstract forms, or what Lissitzky called “elementary means,”
rather than representational narrative devices. Lissitzky wrote that he
intended to engage all children in a thrilling game: “Don’t read the story,
take paper sticks, your building bricks, and put it together, paint it, build
it.” The book flows like a comic strip or film. “All the frames are linked
by the uninterrupted movement of simple related figures in a sequence
which ends in the final chord of the red square,” explained N. Khadzhiev.
“The words move within the fields of force of the figures as they act: these
are squares, universal and specifically plastic forces are brought forth
typographically.”
Of Two Squaresinspired Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz, and Theo
Van Doesburg’s The Scarecrow(Aposs-Verlag, 1925 ), in which the letters B,
O,and Xare characters of the comic story about a pitiful scarecrow who is
unable to scare anything and runs afoul of a farmer. These witty typecase
anthropomorphisms, a shift from naturalism to symbolism in children’s
iconography, tested the limits of visual and textual comprehension. Like Of
Two Squares,The Scarecrowwas originally derived from adult typographic
experiments, in this case Schwitters’s own Merz nonsense poems.The
Scarecrowwas certainly in Lissitzky’s mind when in 1929 he designed his
second children’s book,Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division,in
which capital letters were transformed into bodies and limbs of a factory
worker, farmer, and Red Army soldier, each a symbolic component of Soviet
society used as mnemonic tools to teach arithmetic. “This is how to use
letters to put together every kind of arithmetical method—try it yourself!”
Lissitzky commanded his readers. This book, however, was never published
and only the dummy remains. Following Lissitzky’s inspirational path, Piet
Zwart created Het Boek Van PTTin 1938 to inform children about the
Dutch postal, telephone, and telegraphic company (PTT). Full-color
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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