Thomas Girst

Cultural Manager; Writer / Product Design / Germany / BMW Group

Thomas Girst’s Book List

The existence of books is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. The things we think about—the things that matter (life, love, death, eros, logos, thanatos)—have already been thought of thousands of years before. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. It is through books that we can communicate with the past, like lighthouses along the shoreline, as Baudelaire once said. It is through books that we can delve into any culture on the planet at any time. Books need not to have anything to do with morals, but besides knowledge they have a lot to do with empathy and experience.

Books require solitude but with them we are never alone. Books are as important as friends. And your library reveals more about you than your public persona. If only it would support my lifestyle and family, I would be happiest spending my days doing research in libraries and archives all over the world, writing books within rooms upon rooms filled with books from floor to ceiling.

2 books

The BMW Group celebrated 40 years of cultural commitment in 2011. To mark this occasion, Stefan Sagmeister designed the publication CULTURE, featuring our cultural partnerships. The concept is unconventional: CULTURE is not only a book to browse through, but as it also features an integrated, remote-controlled car, it is a book that can be driven around. A limited edition, it was not available for sale. Each of the 1,488 copies is hand-signed and a unique specimen. Arranged together as a whole, all the book covers would create a 7 x 7-meter square depicting a graphically abstracted image of the legendary BMW “four cylinder” building—the company headquarters in Munich built by Karl Schwanzer in 1972—from a bird’s-eye view. It was all jolly good fun to work with Stefan. The book was awarded many international design prizes and we loved the subtlety as well as the humor of the entire approach. Corporate publications usually only last a few moments, from opening the envelope to throwing them in the dustbin. Our book is a unique work of design that no one who has received it ever wants to part with.

Marcel Duchamp

My library contains over 200 books on or by Marcel Duchamp, including many of his original designs. For Designers & Books I singled out the 1945 issue of View magazine (bound as a book in a special edition of 100 copies), with its cover by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp also designed many book covers throughout his career.

The influence of View’s publisher, Charles Henri Ford, and his importance for European as well as American art of the 20th century, is not to be underestimated. Already at the age of 16, Ford was the publisher of the literary journal Blues, highly praised by Gertrude Stein. Among all the amazing things he accomplished until he passed away in 2002 was View, which introduced many international modernist and avant-garde poets and artists to an English-speaking audience.

Marcel Duchamp was not only one of the greatest and most intelligent minds of the 20th century, he was also a truly innovative graphic designer. Milton Glaser based his famous Bob Dylan poster of 1966 on Duchamp’s Self-Portrait in Profile (1958). He also hailed the artist’s 1953 typographical poster for Sidney Janis’s exhibition New York Dada as a source of inspiration to the entire field. As Steven Heller noted in an e-mail exchange with me, “Marcel Duchamp's magazines, Rongwrong, The Blind Man, and New York Dada prefigured the underground press punk and fanzine cultures that emerged in the U.S. Since these publications were ‘un-designed,’ they gave credence to the idea of anti-design. What Duchamp hath wrought, many in my generation continued.”

comments powered by Disqus