A New Hype

For this Today’s Submitted Artwork Sunday, we’ve recived an edition of the new book The Electric Information Age Book, McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels.

The general theme of the book is to attempts to revitalize the printed word with innovative design.

The book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players -designers, graphic artists, editors – stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books.

In a time before iPads, Kindles and Pinterest, they aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques—verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics—that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp holds the Pierotti Chair in Italian Literature at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000 with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary platform for testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world. Since 2009, he has served as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and visiting professor in Comparative Literature and at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

LINK!