Book Review: BiblioGraphic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books

Graphics have their day

At last the graphics crowd get their turn with a hundred best books. As with all 'best of' this is a visually subjective showing but I thought amazingly comprehensive and I doubt that anyone who calls themselves a design professional would not own a few of these titles. The chapters follow an interesting sequence: Typography; Sourcebooks; Instructional; Histories; Anthologies and finally Monographs. Within each chapter the books are shown in date publishing order.

Many of the standard graphic design and typo titles are obviously here but it definitely is a subjective list because a 1970s Letraset type transfer catalog is included, not strictly a book with an ISBN but back then these catalogs were eagerly awaited in the UK. A couple of quirky additions are the 'Old Advertising Cuts from A-Z', basically a 1989 paper sample book from French Paper (I always found it annoying to use because the pages were so thick) and the amazing 1989, Stockholm published 'Carouschka's Tickets'. A huge eight by thirteen inches book with 394 pages full of tickets from around the world.

The format presents each book over two pages with title and publisher details plus some quite comprehensive copy in one column with the four or five inside spreads and the cover filling up the rest of the space. Printed on good matt art with a two hundred screen this is a book worth looking at. The book spreads are big enough to keep anyone interested in the detail.

There are, though, a couple of whimsical design features: each book title and publisher details are set in a sans face with the x height sitting on fifteen deep cyan rules and likewise with the list of eighteen designers' favorite books (scattered through the pages) this text is turned sideways on the page and sits on red rules. To my mind if all rules were deleted it wouldn't make the text any less readable. It's just the book designer doing something for themselves and not the reader. Pure whimsy.

If you look through the pages and see a book worth getting, I bet, now that Bibliographic is published, second-hand copies will increase in value. For instance, the copy of 'Nova: 1966-1975' (pages 193/93) costs between $375 and $449 or 'A Sign System Manual' by Crosby, Fletcher, Forbes (pages 94/95) runs between $285 and $368. I didn't know, until I saw it on pages 184/185, that Bradbury Thompson had published a book in 1988 about his Westvaco magazine work, I recently managed to find a copy just under $60 and what a wonderful looking title it is.

I have a few of the Top Hundred titles, mostly from past decades but I would have included these if I was creating the Top 100. I've uploaded spreads from these titles so you can see some inside pages.

• American Modernism: Graphic Design, 1920-1960
• Typewise
• The Pentagram Papers: A collection of 36 papers containing curious, entertaining, stimulating, provocative, and occasionally controversial points of view that have come to the attention of...Pentagram
• Magazine Design
• Twen: Revision einer Legende (German Edition)
• Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965
• U&lc : Influencing Design & Typography
• Typographic Communications Today

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