I SEEM TO BE A VERB
R. Buckminster Fuller with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore
R. Buckminster Fuller with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore: I SEEM TO BE A VERB. New York: Bantam Books 1970. First edition. Small octavo. 192 pp. Elaborate graphic design throughout by Quentin Fiore. Vintage ink notation inside front wrapper, otherwise interior unmarked and clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly worn, but a very good plus copy.
4.25 x 7 mass-marker paperback, an exceptional production by the American architect and inventor in collaboration with producer Jerome Angel and designer Quentin Fiore. Experimental book full of utopian plans and musings, insights with the explicit notion that humans aren't static beings but constantly in motion, verbs so to speak, not nouns. The unusual concept underlines the highly creative content of Fuller's book, with upper half of each page reading in black from front to back and the text in lower half upside down in green, so that the book also can be read in reverse. His intention "What I am trying to do." is a sentence stretching over half a page without punctuation is, well: "The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: An instruction book didn't come with it." Beautifully illustrated with reproductions of photographs and illustrations.
"Fiore, who was born in New York in 1920, had been a student of George Grosz (like Paul Rand) at the Art Student's League and Hans Hoffman at the Hoffman School. His interest in classical drawing, paper making, and lettering attested to a respect for tradition. He began his career before World War II as a letterer for, among others, Lester Beall (for whom he designed many of the modern display letters used in his ads and brochures before modern typefaces became widely available in the U.S.), Condé Nast, Life , and other magazines (where he did hand-lettered headlines for editorial and advertising pages). Fiore abandoned lettering to become a generalist and for many years designed all the printed matter for the Ford Foundation in a decidedly modern but not rigidly ideological style. Since he was interested in the clear presentation of information, he was well suited as a design consultant to various university presses, and later to Bell Laboratories (for whom he designed the numbers on one of Henry Dreyfuss' rotary dials). In the late 1960s he also worked on Homefax, a very early telephone fax machine developed by RCA and NBC. It was never marketed, but Fiore coordinated an electronic newspaper that would appear on a screen and be reproduced via a sophisticated electrostatic copying process.
“Quentin Fiore's acute understanding of technology came from this and other experiences. In an article he wrote in 1971 on the future of the book, Fiore predicted the widespread use of computer-generated design, talking computers, and home fax and photocopy technologies. He also predicted the applications of the computer in primary school education long before its widespread use; accordingly, in 1968 he designed 200 computerlike "interactive" books for school children to help increase literacy skills. McLuhan's philosophy was a logical extension of Fiore's own practice.
"His second coproduction with McLuhan, however, was, by Fiore's own admission less successful than The Massage. According to a once sympathetic critic, the book-War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated With More Feed-Forward -was a "crankish, repetitive and disjointed tome in which McLuhan's puns had become a nervous tic." McLuhan based his book on the bewildering idea that war is a result of the anxiety aroused when changing metaphors in perception fail to yield up familiar self-images. Fiore's design was a combination of disparate imagery and text, which tried with little success to reign in McLuhan's now-humorless meanderings. Fiore also worked on a book with another futurist, Buckminster Fuller, titled I Am A Verb, which (prefiguring certain contemporary information-anxiety books) could be read from front to back or back to front.
"Fiore had a wonderful experience with a book that was universally panned by the critics, Jerry Rubin's Do It! , its title conceived by Fiore (and later, one suspects, adopted by Nike). For this he worked directly with the former Yippy, typographically emphasizing certain ideas in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the Dadaists and Futurists. Photographs were also used as icons and exclamation points, strewn through the text to add sight and sound to an idea or a pronouncement. Fiore was as loose as possible while still working within the constraints of bookmaking. For Fiore, however, this was the most appropriate way to convey the information at hand. Looking back at these books today, Fiore says they were just "jobs," each requiring special treatment. That three of these became icons of their age was purely an accident.
"After these experiments, as before, Fiore continued to apply himself to a variety of assignments using appropriate methods. In 1985 he returned to drawing and letter design as the illustrator for the Franklin Library's version of Moby-Dick, but his '60s work is that bridge between the old and new, the beginning of the "end" of the classic book." — Steven Heller, adapted from an essay in Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design (Allworth Press, 1997).
R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller has been called the grandfather of the green movement. He coined the word “dymaxion” in 1930 to describe “maximum gain of advantage from the minimum energy input,” and began developing houses, cars, and maps according to this principle. He was a geodesic guru to Whole Earth Catalog hippies, and was recently resurrected with an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that honored his lasting legacy.
I Seem To Be a Verb focuses on what’s now known as “sustainable design.” The book is a collage of images, bite-size facts, and provocative, inspirational notions by an expanse of artists, musicians, astrophysicists, mathematicians, politicians, and others… which is why my copy’s pages came to fall out of their binding over the past 40-plus years. Fuller himself provides the main narrative, which includes his philosophies—such as “When man learned to do more with less it was his lever to industrial success”—his predictions, such as “When automation frees all workers we will be able to ask, ‘What was it I was thinking that fascinated me so, before I was told I had to do something else in order to make a living?'” And, yes, it’s also a time capsule of 1960s utopian idealism.
I Seem To Be a Verb is much more ambitious in scope than McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, and Fiore’s spreads reflect that expansiveness. The book opens with text and images printed in black, which shortly shifts to the upper half of the page as upside-down green comes to graze along the bottom. Rhythmic builds and variations in type and layout ease you through the pages while clever and often humorous visual juxtapositions surprise and engage you.
Near the presumed “end,” you’re told that “The words ‘up’ and ‘down’ have no meaning.” And sure enough, on page 192 the design leads you to take a 180-degree revolution and continue through the second half. Once back to the beginning, your eyes are prompted to follow a single-line overview—pre-reminiscent of a Jenny Holzer LED display—that flows through the page centers, again running first in black and—flip!—then in green. The whole experience feels like having gained access to an ever-expanding, free-form wellspring of information… only in print rather than online. — Michael Dooley