Disaster graphics (5/5)

When disaster hits will you be prepared? Your community could be devastated by flooding, an earthquake or maybe you get lost in a wilderness or catch a deadly virus. Knowing what to do in these situations is mostly the province of governments or regional authorities. Taras Young's fascinating book is a huge collection of public service printed matter from around the world.

The four chapters cover Pandemics, Natural disasters, Nuclear war and Alien invasion. The Introduction reveals that governments, in the last century, when the population was threatened by unthinkable threats developed various disciplines involving psychology, sociology, disaster management and of course public relations. The end result was printed matter with instructions presented in the simplest form possible. Page forty shows a 1953 Chinese tuberculosis prevention poster aimed at the elderly, it has four illustrations covering a balanced diet, fresh air, walking and relaxing at home. The book is bang up to date with an  NHS Covid-19 poster with ten graphics showing various hand-washing techniques.

Natural disaster looks at weather extremes like twisters, flooding, earthquakes, forest fires and survival techniques. Actually, some of the material in this chapter is aimed at more professional people. The US Department of Commerce published in 1993 'The advance spotters field guide' showing techniques for analyzing weather extremes, the illustrations look quite technical. Pages 144-145 have a booklet issued to aircrews by the Air Ministry in 1950 about jungle survival, for illustrations about building a palm bed and shelter or a log raft.

Nuclear war presented the authorities with a serious challenge. How to survive it, were there realistic practical measures that the living could follow? The chapter has printed material from the US, UK, Japan, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Canada, Ireland and the Soviet Union. Plenty of illustrations show how families could survive in their homes, or in the US in domestic fallout shelters but there was always the threat of radioactive fallout. As this chapter is about war I was surprised that some of the fifty cigarette card set 'Air raid precautions', issued in 1938 weren't included.

The author goes the extra mile with the last chapter: Alien invasion, a brief overview of flying saucer sightings (mostly in the US) and a couple of pages about the SETI program, man's attempt to contact other life forms in the universe.

I thought the book was a worthwhile look at how government agencies prepared the public for possible disasters. It has hundreds of illustrations, all captioned.

Making tracks (5/5)

An early example of a graphic novel (published in 1994) with the graphic aspect totally unrelated to the conventional meaning of the term. There are thirty-nine paintings by Michael Flanagan (1943-2012) on the right-hand pages but you really have to see some to appreciate the extraordinary amount of work that has gone into them. Each image has a photographic style rendering with some handwriting underneath. This writing is typeset on the left-hand page and printed on a color panel. Additional type on part the left-handpage is the novel.

I thought the story was worthwhile enough but my interest in the book is primarily the paintings. Flanagan has managed to capture a bygone age of the railroad but in a unique way. The pictures are on torn and crumpled paper with stains, creases, tape stuck on a tear and nicely here and there additional pieces of paper underneath the top sheet, all this has been painted.  Actually, it's a shame that the book wasn't bigger so the reader can enjoy these amazing images. I couldn't find any reference to how big the originals were, with the amount of handwriting below each image I would guess they were three or four times the size in the book.

I think this is a remarkable book that you can pick up for less than the shipping costs.

Building a book (5/5)

The author, Andre Tavares, has researched a fascinating study of the architectural book through the centuries. While a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture he used their extensive library of historical books about building design and they provided the majority of the 120 images throughout these pages. The book is in two sections with Part one considering titles related to the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and Sigfried Giedion's 1929 book 'Befreites wohnen' (Living liberated). Part two is divided into five chapters based on the essentials of architecture: Texture; Surface; Rhythm; Structure; Scale.

Giedion's book, has the most pages devoted to an individual title (forty-three) and Tavares uses it as a reasonable template for the ideal architectural book, though Giedion was no book designer and it shows. Professor Sokratis Georgiadis is quoted that the design "is not just devoid of style, it is, deliberately, downright ugly." Pages eighty and eighty-one reproduce twenty-five spreads showing a mixture of upright photos and landscape ones requiring the book frequently to be turned around. In the chapter devoted to Rhythm there are reproductions of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 'Moterei, photographie, film' (1925) and Erich Mendelsohn's 'Amerika' (1926) which both have a much more interesting page design.

Part two with its five chapters reproduces some wonderful pages from architectural books. Obviously, a book was the best way of passing on construction knowledge though printing techniques sometimes meant that text was printed first then another print run for the images. Two spreads from a 1521 book about Vitruvius show a very clean-looking layout with text and images, it looks clean because there are no separate paragraphs, all the text runs on with paragraphs indicated by a symbol within the text. Architect Humphrey Repton in his 1800 book 'The Red Book of Hatchlands in Surrey' developed a technique of overlays for his building pictures allowing the reader to flip from reality to the building's future look. Several examples of this technique are shown. The chapter on Structure gets down to the basics of construction. Two French books reveal the details using pictures, one from 1762 has a spread showing a pile-driver, and an 1859 one dissects an interior buttress and the springing point of an arch. The last chapter on Scale features several pages from books and a prospectus designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, they all look as interesting as his buildings.

I think it's worth commenting on this book's anatomy. It's beautifully conceived with two columns per page, a wide one for the main text and a narrower one for the Notes, there are just over nine hundred of these, other publishers might have put them in the back pages where they would require plenty of flipping backward and forwards. The Notes here appear on their relevant pages. All the images of book spreads and pages are treated as cutouts with the addition of a slight shadow to give them a dimensional look on the page. The non-text pages (title, contents, index et cetera) are designed with an elegant simplicity that works for the reader.

Andre Tavares has written and Lars Muller published a remarkable book about building books.