Design and Children’s Books at the TDC
On Tuesday, March 18 Leonard Marcus will speak at the TDC on children’s picture books designed by graphic artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Bruno Munari. Marcus is the curator of the exhibition The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter, currently on view at The New York Public Library.
In honor of the Marcus’ talk, the Type Directors Club is exhibiting a series of contemporary prints inspired by early nineteenth-century British pamphlets called chapbooks, which contained educational rhymes, folklore, and news. Chapbooks were produced cheaply and hawked by journeymen for pennies on the street. Stories and lessons once passed down orally were put to paper quickly and often poorly, using worn-out type and illustrations, or “cuts,” created years or sometimes even decades before. Hundreds of thousands of chapbooks were produced and sold plain as printed or colored for an extra cent or two.
The print series on view recombines images and letters chosen from a large scrapbook made in England in the 1830s. Research into the name stamped onto the album’s binding, “B. de B. Russell,” led to the discovery of its owner, Blois de Blois Russell, a young man of privilege with a strikingly unusual name. He attended St. John’s College at Oxford, rowed crew, and died at 22. In his honor, the designers at The Graphics Office named this project B. de B.
Visit B. de B. for more on the prints.
