Any designer who knows their graphic arts history will be familiar with Herbert Bayer's remarkable atlas privately published by the Container Corporation of America in 1953. It was much more than an ordinary atlas because it also contained a huge amount of data shown in a very graphic form. 30,000 copies were printed and freely given to clients of CCA and other interested individuals (the company had previously published an atlas in 1935, also free). The Bayer version had two printers: Rand McNally and Agostini in Italy. An interesting footnote on page forty-seven says that McNally used six-color printing for their maps while Agostini used ten.
Benjamin Benus has written a very comprehensive survey about the atlas looking at Bayer's design background, how the graphic style of the pages was developed, the production and why the CCA, through its CEO Walter Paepcke, took a very enlightened view of corporate affairs.
The few copies of the atlas that come onto the market are costly so the eighteen whole-page atlas reproductions shown in the book are about as close as I'm likely to get to the original. There are plenty of smaller atlas pages and other illustrations mixed in with the text. I enjoyed the footnotes on the relevant pages rather than stuck in the back pages.
The book celebrates Bayer's remarkable infographics from decades ago.
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