DESIGN AND PAPER No. 30
Saul Steinberg, P. K. Thomajan [Editor]
Saul Steinberg, P. K. Thomajan [Editor]: DESIGN AND PAPER No. 30. New York: Marquardt & Company Fine Papers, n. d. [c. 1948]. A very good or better softcover booklet in stiff, staped wrappers: spine edge lightly rubbed and worn. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.
4.75 x 7.75 softcover booklet with 16 pages of text and graphics printed on one color concerning Saul Steinberg. Steinberg (1914-1999) was a Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker. If you haven’t already familiarized youself with the Mr. Steinberg’s quirky wit, please take the opportunity to do so.
Saul Steinberg (1914 – 1999) was one of America’s most beloved artists, renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades and for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. Steinberg’s art, equally at home on magazine pages and gallery walls, cannot be confined to a single category or movement. He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In View of the World from 9th Avenue, his famous 1976 New Yorker cover, a map delineates not real space but the mental geography of Manhattanites. In other Steinbergian transitions, fingerprints become mug shots or landscapes; graph or ledger paper doubles as the facade of an office building; words, numbers, and punctuation marks come to life as messengers of doubt, fear, or exuberance; sheet music lines glide into violin strings, record grooves, the grain of a wood table, and the smile of a cat.
Through such shifts of meaning from one passage to the next, Steinberg's line comments on its own transformative nature. In a deceptively simple 1948 drawing, an artist (Steinberg himself) traces a large spiral. But as the spiral moves downward, it metamorphoses into a left foot, then a right foot, then the profile of a body, until finally reaching the hand holding the pen that draws the line.
This emblem of a draftsman in the act of generating himself and his line epitomizes a fundamental principle of Saul Steinberg’s work: his art is about the ways artists make art. Steinberg did not represent what he saw; rather, he depicted people, places, and even numbers or words in styles borrowed from other art, high and low, past and present. In his pictorial imagination, the very artifice of style, of images already processed through art, became the means to explore social and political systems, human foibles, geography, architecture, language and, of course, art itself. [The Saul Steinberg Foundation]
The first six of Marquardt’s DESIGN AND PAPER series of promotional booklets were portfolios showcasing a variety of artists. From Number Seven on, each issue was devoted to an individual artist. The DESIGN AND PAPER series published original booklets designed by Ladislav Sutnar, Saul Steinberg, Raymond Loewy, E. McKnight Kauffer, Erik Nitsche, George Krikorian, Georges Wilmet, Ugo Mochi, Walter Westerveldt, Clarence John Laughlin, and others. Since the booklets promoted Marquardt papers, the design and printing of each issue met the highest production standards of the day.
From “The House Organ: Design and Paper” by P. K. Thomajan from Print Vol. 5, No. 3, 1947: “The idea for this typographic gem started with Edward Alonzo Miller, then associated with The Marchbanks Press. He suggested to Oswald F. Marquardt exactly 10 years ago, the project of issuing an attractive quarterly presenting fine artwork on fine papers, thereby inspiring the increased usage of the latter. Mr. Marquardt promptly O.K.’d the idea and ever since has been O.K.’ing more and more ambitious issues.”
“The early issues were devoted to impressive assemblages of trademarks, title pages, woodcuts, specimens of hand lettering and distinctive typefaces by prominent designers. These were printed on varying shades of antique papers, wire-stitched and thread-tied for that extra touch.”
“Distribution is directed principally to printers , art directors, trade press, and important executives. In addition, many copies go to non-customers, such as instructors of journalism and the graphic arts, who use copies as noteworthy specimens for classroom discussion.”