ESQUIRE FOR SEPT . . . ON GOING BACK TO SCHOOL
Paul Rand
Paul Rand: ESQUIRE FOR SEPT. . . ON GOING BACK TO SCHOOL. Chicago/New York: Esquire/Coronet, 1940. Original edition. Square quarto. Wire spiral-bound 2-color self-wrappers bound in the Japanese style. 18 pp. One fold-out. Text and photocollages. Faint scratches paralleling top edge of front panel, otherwise a fine fresh copy. Rare.
10.75 x 10.75 wire spiral-bound booklet with 18 pages promoting the September 1940 Back to School issue of Esquire magazine. Rand specified the text set in American Typewriter, predating by two years his brilliant use of that font in the MECHANIZED MULES OF VICTORY AutoCar brochure. The cursive subheads sprinkled throughout harken to Tschichold's title-page typography for TYPOGRAPHISCHE GESTALTUNG [Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1935.] Rand also uses collage to illustrate the section dividers: History, Economics, Psychology, Mathematics, Literature, and Logic. Rand's manipulation of these disparate elements into a coherent package reveals an early glimpse of a true master finding his voice.
Illustrated in A-D, February- March 1941 and Heller: PAUL RAND, Phaidon 1999 [pp. 20-1]. A high point of American Graphic Design and a truly rare document.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a pioneer typographer, photographer, and designer of the modern movement and a master at the Bauhaus in Weimar, may have come closest to defining the Rand style when he said Paul was "an idealist and a realist using the language of the poet and the businessman. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems, but his fantasy is boundless."
If the word legend has any meaning in the graphic arts and if the term legendary can be applied with accuracy to the career of any designer, it can certainly be applied to Paul Rand (1914-1996). In 1951, the legend was already firmly in place. By then Paul had completed his first career as a designer of media promotion at Esquire-Coronetãand as an outstanding cover designer for Apparel Arts and Directions. He was well along on a second career as an advertising designer at the William Weintraub agency which he had joined as art director at its founding. Paul Rand's book, Thoughts on Design, with reproductions of almost one hundred of his designs and some of the best words yet written on graphic design, had been published four years earlierãa publishing event that cemented his international reputation and identified him as a designer of influence from Zurich to Tokyo.
The chronology of Paul Rand's design experience has paralleled the development of the modern design movement. Paul Rand's first career in media promotion and cover design ran from 1937 to 1941, his second career in advertising design ran from 1941 to 1954, and his third career in corporate identification began in 1954. Paralleling these three careers there has been a consuming interest in design education and Paul Rand's fourth career as an educator started at Cooper Union in 1942. He taught at Pratt Institute in 1946 and in 1956 he accepted a post at Yale University's graduate school of design where he held the title of Professor of Graphic Design.
In 1937 Paul launched his first career at Esquire. Although he was only occasionally involved in the editorial layout of that magazine, he designed material on its behalf and turned out a spectacular series of covers for Apparel Arts, a quarterly published in conjunction with Esquire. In spite of a schedule that paid no heed to regular working hours or minimum wage scales, he managed in these crucial years to find time to design an impressive array of covers for other magazines, particularly Directions. From 1938 on his work was a regular feature of the exhibitions of the Art Directors Club.
Paul spent fourteen years in advertising where he demonstrated the importance of the art director in advertising and helped break the isolation that once surrounded the art department. The final thought of his Thoughts on Design is worth repeating: "Even if it is true that commonplace advertising and exhibitions of bad taste are indicative of the mental capacity of the man in the street, the opposing argument is equally valid. Bromidic advertising catering to that bad taste merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies him one of the most easily accessible means of aesthetic development."
In 1954 when Paul Rand decided that for him Madison Avenue was no longer a two-way street and he resigned from the Weintraub agency, he was cited as one of the ten best art directors by the Museum of Modern Art. This was the same year in which he received the gold medal from the Art Directors Club for his Morse Code advertisement addressed to David Sarnoff of RCA.