DYNAMIC AMERICA
A HISTORY OF GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION
AND ITS PREDECESSOR COMPANIES
Erik Nitsche [Designer], J. Niven and C. Canby [Editors]
Erik Nitsche [Designer], John Niven and Courtlandt Canby [Editors]: DYNAMIC AMERICA: A HISTORY OF GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION AND ITS PREDECESSOR COMPANIES. Fort Worth and New York City: General Dynamics and Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1960. First edition. Folio. Blue cloth stamped in blue. Printed dust jacket. Elaborate endpapers. 426 pp. Multiple tipped-in artworks. Over 1,000 color and black-and-white illustrations. Dust jacket with trivial edege wear to top edges, and a couple of tiny scrapes and rubbed spots. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Designed by Erik Nitsche. A nearly fine copy housed in a nearly fine dust jacket. Rare thus.
10.5 x 14.5 hard cover book with 426 pages and over 1,000 full-color and black-and-white illustrations. An elegantly designed presentation of the history of General Dynamics -- and maybe America too: "It is the chronicle of a tumultuous period, of a nation oscillating between war and peace, of a people committed to a scientific future both to protect and advance Western civilization." Beautifully printed in Switzerland with inserts and some of the best endpapers ever.
From "Erik Nitsche: The Reluctant Modernist" by Steven Heller on the typotheque web site: "Seymour Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios, compares his tattered, well-thumbed copy of 'Dynamic America,' the ambitious corporate history that Nitsche edited and designed between 1957 and 1960, to Herbert Bayer's landmark Geo-Graphic Atlas for its innovation in the area of information graphics. And Walter Bernard, principal of WBMG, routinely shows slides of 'Dynamic America' in lectures describing his early influences. Bernard also credits the book’s exceptional cinematic pacing as having radically changed the way that he achieved kinetic flow in his own books when he was a designer for American Heritage in the early 1960s."
- Years of Growth
- World Power
- Towards War
- The Flying Machine
- The United States Goes to War
- Postwar: Starving Times
- Postwar: Times of Peace
- America Takes to the Air
- The Great Buildup
- The Test of Arms
- The Emergence of General Dynamics
- The Scientific Revolution
From the web site for The Art Director's Club: "The genius of Erik Nitsche encompasses virtually the entire sphere of visual communications. 'I would put him on the top-ten list of the best 20th-century designers in the world,' said Michael Aron, graphic artist and professor at the Parsons School of Design. Nitsche's prodigious and globe-straddling career, spanning nearly 60 years, included art direction, book design, typography, illustration, photography, film, signage, exhibits, packaging, industrial design, corporate design, and advertising."
“Eric Nitsche (1908 –1998) may not be as well known today as his contemporaries, Lester Beall, Paul Rand, or Saul Bass, but he is their equal. Almost 90 years old, this Swiss born graphic designer is arguably one of the last surviving Modern design pioneers. Although he never claimed to be either a progenitor or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or style other than his own intuition, the work that earned him induction last year into the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame, including the total identity for General Dynamics Corporation from 1955 to 1965 and the series of scientific, music, and world history illustrated books, which he designed and packaged during the 1960s and 1970s, fits squarely into the Modernist tradition.
“Yet Nitsche’s approach was not a cookie-cutter Modern formula that so many designers blindly followed at that time. It was a personal fusion of early influences (classical and otherwise) and contemporary aesthetics based on fast pacing and dramatic juxtapositions. Rather than adherence to Modernist orthodoxy, Nitsche insists that the methodology that most closely resembles a Modern manner, clean, systematic, and ordered, developed because of his restlessness at doing mostly illustrative work during the early part of his career.
“Although he might not own up to the fact that he had played a formidable role in the Modernist legacy, Nitsche does not deny that he was as good - certainly as prolific, if not more so - than any other designer of his age. He also speculates that had it not been for his asocial tendencies ("I preferred to do the work, not talk about it") and a few poor business decisions along the way (he says he turned down a job at IBM that later went to Paul Rand), he might be as well known today as any of the other acknowledged pioneers. In fact, he worked for many of the same clients, including Orbachs, Bloomingdale’s, Decca Records, RCA Records, Filene’s, 20th Century Fox, The Museum of Modern Art, Container Corporation of America, the New York Transit Authority, Revlon, and more. Judging from the sheer volume of work bearing his signature or type credit, there are few others who can make this claim.
“Nitsche’s books, annual reports, and other sequential printed material rely on meticulous attention to the details of page composition, the elegance of simple type presentation, and the expressive juxtaposition of historical and contemporary artifacts on a page. His method exerted an impact on a portion of the field that had become too reliant on rigid Modern formulas, which in turn limited variety and fluidity. Yet this reluctant Modernist was so absorbed with creating and producing his own wares that he had little time to reflect on what he was actually doing to change the attitudes of other designers. Even today he is surprised to hear that his work made an impression.” — Steven Heller [xlist_2018]