The book is available to pre-order and will ship from 15 October 2026.
The book has been realized in collaboration with Fabrizio Falcone.
Monograms, the most elementary of letter combinations, paradoxically offer great opportunities for expressive creativity. Just two well-drawn letters can have more appeal and communicative power than a logotype made up of six.
Legibility is sometimes replaced by a visual puzzle: the image created by the letters is so compelling that the viewer accepts the challenge of deciphering them, and is “rewarded” with the satisfaction of having solved an enigma. This balance between complexity and seduction runs through almost two and a half thousand years of history and distinguishes the monogram from the logo, a marketing tool that emerged only at the end of the nineteenth century.
The book traces the history, design and applications of monograms over more than two millennia: from ancient Greek coins to medieval and Renaissance documents, from architecture to embroidery, and on to contemporary graphics and animated monograms. The first part of the book investigates the historical developments from ancient Greece to the modernism of the 1930s; the second examines five very different genres from the Second World War to 2024, a mere eighty years that count for as much as the previous two thousand, thanks to the creativity unleashed by the demands of consumer society and the rise of the graphic designer.
With over five hundred illustrations accompanied by critical analysis and the designers’ own words, this is the first volume to offer a serious historical and critical treatment of the subject: a resource for design historians and a source of inspiration for graphic designers, type designers and calligraphers.
Text
James Clough
With the collaboration of
Fabrizio Falcone
Foreword
Steven Heller
Book design
Bunker, Fabrizio Falcone
16.5 × 23.5 cm
256 pages
Paperback
Language: Italian
ISBN 978-88-98030-53-8
First edition October 2026
