Showing posts with label czech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label czech. Show all posts

Saturday, January 19, 2013

The Posters of Dr. Hans Sachs


The legendary poster collection of Hans Sachs, the German dentist and the foremost collector of posters in early 20th Century Europe is being auctioned this weekend by Guernsey’s. Sachs began his collection of what he called “a new kind of advertising art,” as a teenager at the turn of the century and went on to amass over 12,000 posters. He was responsible for founding a society in 1905 to advance poster collecting and scholarship, and launched an associated magazine, Das Plakat with the designer, Lucian Bernhard.

On Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, by order of Nazi propagandist-in-chief Josef Goebbels, the collection was confiscated. The collector’s great granddaughter writes of how, at gunpoint, Sachs loaded his collection onto three awaiting trucks and never saw it again. Read her fascinating story of the creation, loss and rediscovery of this vast collection here.


In the interest of actually getting these images posted, I’ve done away with the annotations. (Is the unannotated post worth posting? I hope so.) You can find all the info here.
















































































Saturday, April 28, 2012

Oldřich Hlavsa: Book Covers

Básně obrazy, Guillaume Apollinaire, 1965

I’ve been swooning over the typographic mastery of Czech designer, Oldrich Hlavsa (1909-1995). Though he's best known for his books about typography and book design, here are some of the books he designed.
  
The covers here are all from the 1960s. I’m thinking typographic jazz improvisation—you know one of those solos that go so far out there, you can’t imagine it ever coming back. And when it finally does, there’s way more than polite applause. As far out as Hlavsa might go with fragmenting, duplicating, slicing, or spacing, each does so with enough style and surprise that I’m left wondering how, exactly, he managed to pull it off.

Read more about him here (scroll down for English).

Typografická písma latinková, 1960


Moderní Francouzská Fotografie, J.A.Kaim, 1966



Clockwise from top left: Expresionismus, Ludvík Kundera, 1969; Inspiromat, Bratislav Hartl, 1967; Slovo o Pluku Majakovského, V. Majakovskij, 1961; Začarovaná Drožka, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, 1963


150,000.000, Vladimír Majakovskij


Veřejná Růže, Paul Eluard, 1964


Snář, Radovan Krátký, 1968

Prvotiny, Vydalo Státní, 1961



Pan Meister, Walter Jens, 1967
(Top: Dust jacket)


Posměšky a jízlivosti, Markus Valerius Martialis, 1965


Emil Filla, Čestmír Berka, 1964



Oldrich Mikulasek, Svlekani Hadu, 1963


These images are from Czech antiquarian book sites, of which there are many. You can try here, here, and here.


Monday, June 28, 2010

The Art on Their Sleeves: Vintage 45s

I’m just crazy about these Czechoslovakian 45 record sleeves. These first four, by Opus, manage to be fresh and mod, but also sophisticated in use of color and restraint of design. I particularly like them as a set.


The Opus set, along with the next six sleeves, are from a site devoted the musical career of Slovakian singer Tatiana Hubinska (1944-1999). She was popular during the 1960s and 70s was best know for the Slovak version of ‘Puppet on a String,’ and for her hits ‘Casanova’ and ‘Halo Baby, Halo Boy.’



Halo baby, haló boy (1965)

Puppet on a String (Ako malý psík,1967)


Curious to see what else was out there in foreign 45 record sleeves, I quickly came to a site called Record Envelope: The Little Library of Factory Sleeves. It is maintained by illustrator Kavel Rafferty, and folks from all over the world send her sleeves. She has them nicely categorized by music type, visual motif, etc. Plus there are a ton on flickr. Here is a tiny selection from other countries …

Poland


Sweden


Germany

Belgium

Britain

Netherlands
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