Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century

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Phaidon Press, New York, London, 2003, English

Nonfiction, Graphic Design

ISBN: 9780714839271

From the Publisher. A historical survey of avant-garde cultural and political magazines and journals of the 20th century. Presents rarely seen magazines from all over the globe linked to controversial art, literary, and political movements such as Dada, Surrealism, the New Left and Deconstruction, with graphics and artwork by experimental artists and designers of their time—from Kurt Schwitters and EI Lissitzky in the 1920s and 1930s, to Art Spiegelman and Rudy VanderLans in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Steven Heller

On list of Books by Steven Heller

Rick Poynor

On Rick Poynor’s Book List

It’s hard to decide which title to pick from graphic design’s most prolific author. There are several I consider indispensable and this history of avant-garde magazines from 2003 is one of them, a subject close to my heart, and a volume I return to regularly. The book is superbly illustrated and so well put together that it’s easy to take the smooth flow of perfectly sized pictures and the immaculate balance of text and image for granted, without pausing to consider the mastery of page design (by Hans Dieter Reichert) they represent. Heller has a huge amount of ground to cover and he leads the reader through with equally fluent prose.

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