€ 40,00The volume is a photographic testimony of the American urban fabric of the late 70’s. Charles H. Traub creates a series of portraits, depicting street tenants of Uptown Chicago and Bowery New York.
The author declares: «I wanted to see, to try to touch at least with my camera the experience of loss». The intent was not to satisfy a sort of voyeurism, but to witness the dignity and humanity of the homeless. They were very different from the contemporary ones; today they are no longer the result of individual destinies but of great social disparities.
A famous book by Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side, wondered «why lost people sometimes become greater human beings than those who have never been in their lives». Skid Row responds by highlighting a nobility that unites urban communities, even in the worst moments.
Unfortunately, this sensitivity, due to gentrification and indifference, is now systematically suppressed in favor of a transformation made by urban chic.
It is therefore even more necessary to recount these experiences, so as to recall the fundamental role of the “lost nobles” in the construction of the historical identity of a city.
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Text by Tom Huhn
Book design Bunker21 × 26 cm
112 pages
Hardcover
English
Isbn 978-88-98030-59-0
First published June 2023
€ 35,00The poster collects a hundred images of trees, printed in scale 1:200, with and without foliage, carefully selected from those enclosed in the homonymous volume. Replica of the original poster of L’Architettura degli Alberi from the exhibition of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 1982, corrected in the plates and updated in the graphics. The only difference from the original version is the addition of the
green color.The ink drawings faithfully return the peculiarities of the tree species depicted, allowing us to enjoy their variety and specificity. The scientific nomenclature of each tree is accompanied by vulgar terminology. The images are numbered so as to allow the observer an easy identification of the trees and not only to appreciate their indisputable beauty.
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Original illustrations by Studio Leonardi-Stagi
Design (based on the original layout from 1982) Bunker70 × 100 cm
Paper: Fedrigoni Arena Smooth Natural 170 g
Offset print 2 Pantone colors
Isbn 978-88-98030-61-3
First published April 2023
€ 27,50“Antologia di cultura grafica” is the new series dedicated to the history of visual communication. Edited by Alessandro Colizzi and Silvia Sfligiotti, assisted from time to time by one or more guest editors, the series offers a series of volumes, organized around a theme or era, and includes a rich anthology of texts (articles, essays, chapters, excerpts, posters) translated into Italian and introduced by an essay by the editors.
“La questione moderna in Europa”, first volume of the series, addresses the graphic debate within the modern movement of the interwar years, with an expanded look at the European continent to include authors from cultures and national histories hitherto neglected by historiography.
Far from being a unified phenomenon, the modern movement was characterized by a plurality of manifestations and the presence of very different theoretical positions. In particular, modernist graphics was the result of a process of negotiation between actors belonging to different national contexts. Moreover, actors from multiple disciplinary fields participated in its formation: advertising, publishing, architecture, photography, journalism, and the printing industry.
This anthology reflects the variety of orientations and opinions expressed both within individual national events and by the different personalities involved, who interpreted the ideology of the modern in ways and forms as heterogeneous as ever. The panorama that emerges is decidedly more nuanced and hybrid than has appeared in existing publications to date, and allows us to grasp the phenomenon in its theoretical, aesthetic, technological and social complexity.
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Antologia di cultura grafica 1
Edite by Alessandro Colizzi, Silvia Sfligiotti & Carlo Vinti
Book design Bunker and Alessandro Colizzi
13,5 × 21,5 cm
280 pages
Paperback with flaps
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-56-9
First edition February 2023
€ 18,00Alfazoo is not a conventional zoo. It houses the world’s most unusual animals: wild vowels and consonants nearing extinction.
This ABC turns letters into animals simply by adding a pair of eyes and a mouth to each shape, in a graphic game that invites young readers to play with the letters to invent their own beastly alphabet.
With its freshness and modern design, it is hard to believe that this book by Italian designer Alfredo De Santis was first published in 1968 by Emme Edizioni, the visionary publishing house that brought to the Italian market avant-garde children’s titles by authors such as Leo Lionni, Iela and Enzo Mari, Tomi Ungerer, Yutaka Sugita, Bruno Munari, Luigi Veronesi, Maurice Sendak, Emanuele Luzzati, and Bob Gill.
A timeless design lesson to read forms and symbols through a different visual lens.
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Illustrations by Alfredo de Santis
Text by Marta Sironi
Book design Bunker
(from original design by Emme Edizioni)21 × 21 cm
48 pages
Hardcover
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-57-6
First edition February 2023
€ 19,00Why Pino Tovaglia kept this unpublished work, or what its true genesis is, we will never know. The fact is that his daughter Irene, getting her hands on her father’s materials, found these 24 plates, held together with tape, with an intriguing cover where the Pirelli logo stands out, front and back. The mystery deepens because the managers of the famous brand claim that there is no trace of such a project in their archives; even during the years of the collaboration between the designer and the multinational company nothing leads back to this pamphlet, which appears to be a real prototype.
Whatever its origin, it is in any case an interesting and singular study of the elongated form, which Tovaglia evidently enjoys doing of his own free will. The association with the brand, as far as we can surmise, probably arises by analogy with the content, or vice versa.
The 56 pages of A story as long as are thus a valuable exercise in style, reproposed in its formal integrity, but adapted for a contemporary publication, accompanied by a short text by Marta Sironi, which allows us to investigate and enhance the more human side of one of the most significant figures of Italian graphic design in the second half of the twentieth century.
Dedicated to fans of graphic design, illustration and simple admirers of a great protagonist who spontaneously addresses children, with a hint of mystery…
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Illustrations by Pino Tovaglia
Text by Marta Sironi
Cover by Flavia Ruotolo
Book design Bunker and Flavia Ruotolo21 × 12 cm
56 pages
Paperback with dust jacket
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-54-5
First edition November 2022
€ 58,00Photography is an act of self-awareness towards oneself and one’s cultural background. In his sixty-year career Franco Fontana has photographed what cannot be seen, succeeding in fixing through framing an ‘other’ image that is abstracted from reality, free from the portrayed subject. Geometry, proportions and composition have allowed him to reach, by progressive degrees, a conceptual synthesis that has been translated into linguistic unity and its formal manifestation, images.
Today, the crisis of the liquid society opens to the author the opportunity to explore new territories of the invisible ‘naked eye’, expanding the visual horizon and the iconographic structure while maintaining stylistic coherence and identity. If unity originates from the hybridization of differences, from the affirmation of unity itself originate the differences, in a system in constant balance between conceptual and formal, invisible and visible.
Invisible, a 168-page book with more than 100 photographs, is the restitution of meticulous archival research from which many previously unpublished shots have emerged: from the most experimental research to more intimate evidence of expressive freedom, which constitute the fertile ground from which grew the unmistakable style that has made Franco Fontana internationally famous.
Dedicated to those who know or approach the expressive path of the author, to those who want to explore that inner space, beyond reality, which belongs to the subjective interpretation, where you go in search of the image that is not yet there and that only the sensitivity of the photographer’s eye can capture and translate into a unique and unrepeatable shot. Thus, suddenly, the invisible becomes visible.
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Photographs by Franco Fontana
Editing by Lorenzo Respi
Book design Bunker22 × 27 cm
168 pages
Hardcover
English
Isbn 978-88-98030-58-3
First published November 2022- € 16,00
There are places that exist only in memory, some of them so bizarre that they seem instead to be the figment of a child’s imagination-or perhaps an artist’s or even a designer’s. This is not the case with The Shops of Aoi Huber Kono: the meticulously illustrated facades in this leporello, which Aoi began composing in 1974, correspond to places that did indeed exist, everyday and familiar places.
If we are all accustomed to going to the bakery or the fish market, what happened instead to the confectionery, the dairy, the milliner or the haberdashery? Perhaps someday we will tell our children, as if it were a legend, that toys were not always crammed into the aisles of a shopping mall but that there were stores in which to spend hours looking at them all, magical places to be taken to after being at the doctor’s, or grandparents in secret. Or that once upon a time, when the world was a little less interconnected and much more diverse, there were no places in which to find everything from celery to tires: there were stores.
In this book, whose plates were designed for a small volume in the Tantibambini series, edited by Bruno Munari for Einaudi, Aoi Huber Kono illustrates the facades of 16 stores, making a summary of the most characteristic features of each: some still exist, but who can say for how long?
The title on the cover is a small jewel of design and graphics, the result of the intense collaboration between husband and wife: Max Huber made the curtain strips with colored cutouts and composed the lettering, Aoi embellished it with a punctuated hemming.
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Illustrations by Aoi Huber Kono
Book design Bunker23 × 16 cm
16 pages
Leporello with jacket
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-51-4
First published July 2022 - € 22,50
Many typefaces created today are related to types of the past, and interest in older letterforms is stimulated by the great number of visual resources available. We are surrounded by digital fonts based in one way or another on historical models, but it is clear that we cannot consider all of them as revivals. So, how to distinguish a type revival from a typeface that is loosely based on historical forms? More reflection on this subject is necessary, both to help navigate the landscape of contemporary typefaces, and to give greater clarity to discussions on the history of type. This 104 pages pamphlet provides tools for researching and designing revival types. A concise publication that will show a practical perspective and fresh content, fuelling the conversation among and between designers and scholars.
The content is organised into four parts. The authors begin by defining the theoretical ground, including a definition of revivals, and a discussion on the boundaries of a revival project. The second part introduces the framework of analysis developed for recording the relevant design features of the type used as a model. In the third part, Olocco and Patané apply the framework to the roman type cut by Francesco Griffo for the De Aetna (1496). Based on this analysis, the fourth part showcases the process of reviving this historical type.
Although the authors are focusing on defining a procedure to design a type revival, those suggestions can be adopted beyond the scope of a revival project. Their approach will ensure a strong connection with the original source and a substantial help towards understanding how to employ historical models in a contemporary context.
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Texts by Riccardo Olocco and Michele Patanè
Preface by Gerry Leonidas
Book design by Riccardo Olocco and Michele Patanè12.5 × 21 cm
112 pages
Paperback
English
Isbn 978-88-98030-48-4
First published May 2022 - € 54,00
Early 1980s. From Milan to Marsala, Charles H. Traub composes an ironic and spontaneous portrait of an Italy that today we cannot say whether it really existed. The candid gaze of the American photographer immediately captures the idiosyncrasies of the Bel Paese: laziness, the unbearable and wonderful weight of history, the warm light of the countryside and the vivid light of the sea, the carefree and delightful life of the provinces. Bright blues, reds and yellows engulf the poses and gestures of strangers, transformed into affectionate archetypal caricatures, because Traub has in mind the work of another great master: Federico Fellini.
On his travels in Italy, it is Luigi Ghirri who is his guide: the two do not speak the same language, but share a form of sincere curiosity for what surrounds them and the ability to observe reality with ever new eyes. So it was that in 2012 Traub recognised a lost magic in the photographs from thirty years earlier and decided to make a series out of them. Published for the first time in 2013, Dolce Via Nova renews the original sequence with a wide selection of previously unpublished photographs, edited by Giulia Zorzi and Francesco Ceccarelli, and transforms the book with a new design by Bunker. An essay by poet Luigi Ballerini and a dialogue with Gus Powell complete the work.
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Texts by Luigi Ballerini, Gus Powell
Book design Bunker21 × 26 cm
144 pages
Hardback
English
Isbn 978-88-98030-49-1
First published June 2022 - € 19,00
“What is a sigh made of?”
A mother’s sigh is made of worries and tiredness, but the little ones do not know what it is, otherwise they would be… big! What can they do then to make this sigh lighter? And what can daddy do?This volume stems from the need to recount in pictures the affection between children and their parents, leaving, as is the artist’s custom, the few words associated with the evocative power of images to communicate to us the profound sense of this relationship. The eleven illustrated plates that make up this work tell of small and essential emotions waiting to be discovered.
Lazy Dog’s first book for very young children is dedicated to all mothers and the weight they are able to carry on their shoulders, but also to all the families who bend over backwards to share it.
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Text and illustrations by Ayumi Kudo
Book design Bunker24 × 16 cm
24 pages
Hardback
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-47-7
First published May 2022 - € 29,00
Luca Barcellona is an internationally known calligrapher, whom we are used to knowing for his immediate language, made of sinuous letters that bring calligraphic art into the contemporary world. Lost in Strokes is a publication about the artist’s current work, which, however, differs from the ‘Barcelona world’ we all know.
The book speaks an unprecedented language, on the borderline between asemic writing and painting, which photographs Barcelona’s expressive, stylistic and emotional evolution and his work of very recent times, demonstrating once again how for the author writing represents a dense, meditative, certainly artistic act. Letters for the first time are transformed into urban landscapes that create new pictorial alphabets, skylines start from types, are nourished by writing, but also take their distance from it to become something else, much more complex, as if to summarise the artist’s journey so far.
Certainly “using writing, making writing, and partly overcoming writing itself is an urgent issue in our contemporary times” (Fabiola Naldi), and once again Luca Barcellona positions himself as one of the most interesting artists on the international calligraphy scene, who indeed each time seems to push the boundary of the discipline a little further, trespassing, through an expressive metamorphosis, into contemporary art.
Also available in limited edition: Lost in Strokes – Limited Edition
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Texts by Fabiola Naldi and Luca Barcellona
Soundtrack by Dj Craim
Book design by Bunker21 × 28 cm
48 pages
Gloo bound
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-46-0
First published February 2022 - € 120,00
The special edition boxed contains, in addition to the volume, three 30 × 60 cm posters and the vinyl LP with Dj Craim’s specially reissued soundtrack. Issued in 100 copies, it is available only on our website.
Luca Barcellona is an internationally known calligrapher, whom we are used to knowing for his immediate language, made of sinuous letters that bring calligraphic art into the contemporary world. Lost in Strokes is a publication about the artist’s current work, which, however, differs from the ‘Barcelona world’ we all know.
The book speaks an unprecedented language, on the borderline between asemic writing and painting, which photographs Barcelona’s expressive, stylistic and emotional evolution and his work of very recent times, demonstrating once again how for the author writing represents a dense, meditative, certainly artistic act. Letters for the first time are transformed into urban landscapes that create new pictorial alphabets, skylines start from types, are nourished by writing, but also take their distance from it to become something else, much more complex, as if to summarise the artist’s journey so far.
Certainly “using writing, making writing, and partly overcoming writing itself is an urgent issue in our contemporary times” (Fabiola Naldi), and once again Luca Barcellona positions himself as one of the most interesting artists on the international calligraphy scene, who indeed each time seems to push the boundary of the discipline a little further, trespassing, through an expressive metamorphosis, into contemporary art.
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Texts by Fabiola Naldi and Luca Barcellona
Soundtrack by Dj Craim
Book design by Bunker21 × 28 cm
48 pages
Gloo bound
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-46-0
First published February 2022 - € 13,00
“Cast it” is a publication that uses CAST fonts and deals with the history and culture of type. Issue 5 presents The Processes of Type-making, an excerpt from the first chapter of Plain Printing Types, a book written by the American scholar-printer Theodore Low De Vinne and included in his four-volume treatise The Practice of Typography (1900-1904).
The excerpt focuses on De Vinne’s summaries of electrotypes, stereotypes, printing presses and especially his analyses of typeface wear. As pointed out by Paul Shaw in his preface: “De Vinne’s account of typography, typesetting and printing is that of a large-scale commercial printer” […] “His language is lucid and easily understood by a modern reader in contrast to that of Moxon, Fournier, or even Mackellar.”
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Co-produced with CAST Cooperativa Anonima Servizi Tipografici
Type designers: Erasmo Ciufo, Alessandro Colizzi, Beatrice D’Agostino, Riccardo De Franceschi, Giovanni De Faccio & Lui Karner, Rafael Dietzsch, Alessio D’Ellena, Giulio Galli, Radek Lukasiewicz, Riccardo Olocco, Luciano Perondi, Leo Philp, Gianluca Sandrone, Tipiblu
Preface by Paul Shaw
Editing by Andrea Amato, James Clough, Massimo Gonzato, Riccardo Olocco
Book design by +fortuna16.5 × 24 cm
48 pages
English
Issn 2531-765
Isbn 978-88-98030-44-6
First published December 2021 - € 48,00
1963. Gusmano Cesaretti, 19 years old, a passion for the ‘American dream’, a camera and a one-way ticket to New York. Thus was born the incredible story of ‘The Picture Man’, the man who, from the province of Lucca, without speaking English, landed in the United States, becoming perhaps the most authoritative and direct eye on American subcultures.
First in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, Gusmano and his camera are one and the same, his eye documenting first-hand the urban subcultures of the time: metropolitan jazz, the beat generation, the East L.A. of the Chicanos, the Mexican mystical experiences. He is in the right place at the right time, a direct and reliable eyewitness, with his raw, instinctive, vibrant and authentic style of so-called street photography, contributing to the genesis of the Western collective imagination. He later worked, as director of photography and image consultant, alongside some of the most influential directors of late 20th century American cinema, such as Michael Mann, Tony Scott and Marc Forster.
It is a life ‘on film’ that of Gusmano, traced in this book thanks to an interview conducted in 2018 by young photographer and creative director Stefano Lemon, who outlines his human experience and artistic career. 168 pages and 85 photographs, most of which have never been published, recount the stages of an extraordinary journey that began more than fifty years earlier, creating a sort of magical passing of the baton.
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Photographs by Gusmano Cesaretti
Preface by Jeffrey Deitch, Chaz Bojorquez
Texts by Stefano Lemon
Calligraphy by Luca Barcellona
Book design by Bunker17 × 25 cm
168 pages
Swiss style paperback
English/Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-38-5
First published November 2021 - € 30,00
Lorenzo Mattotti, an internationally renowned illustrator, much loved by the public, has always looked to the seventh art as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
This book, produced on the occasion of the 2021 edition of the Festival International du Film de La Roche-sur-Yon, which has dedicated an unprecedented exhibition to the artist, aims to highlight the double thread that links Mattotti’s work to cinema. This double thread has led him over the years to design the posters of films and major film festivals, until signing in 2019 the highly successful animated feature film The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival.
The volume is divided into four sections: Film festival posters, from the image of numerous festivals in the 1990s, to the prestigious commission for Cannes, to the Venice Film Festival; Editorial illustrations, commissioned by “The New Yorker” during its long collaboration with the famous American magazine; Film posters, including Eros, for which he drew the poetic interludes that open the three episodes directed by Wong Kar-wai, Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh; and finally, animated films, from the very first Bluebeard, through Pinocchio to the aforementioned The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, accompanied by unpublished sketches and storyboards.
The volume concludes with a long and impassioned interview with Lorenzo Mattotti by the Festival’s artistic director Charlotte Serrand, who traces the stages of his journey into the seventh art, which began in his great-uncle’s cinema, Cinema Mattotti.
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Edited by Melania Gazzotti
With the collaboration of Charlotte Serrand
Illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti
Texts by Melania Gazzotti, Charlotte Serrand, Maximilien Schnel
Book design by Bunker19.5 × 26 cm
112 pages
Hardback
French/Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-43-9
First published October 2021 - € 21,00
The result of 6 years of work, Il bacio della lucertola (The Lizard’s Kiss) is the graphic novel with which Luca Zamoc debuts in the publishing world. The story stems from an intense journey of Zamoc in 2013 through the Thai jungle and creeps into the mind and pen of the author until it becomes today a masterpiece of 96 pages, redrawn three times before arriving at the final form. Everything starts from an accident in the Indonesian jungle: the dramatic fate of the protagonist and his companion will be the pretext for deep existential and spiritual reflections, while in the background reality dialogues with fantasy, opening to the reader imaginative, primordial and visionary scenarios.
Also in this case it is possible to find the stylistic code of the authors, who are distinguished by the investigation on the relationship between Man, Nature and Mythology. A journey of exploration in an inhospitable and wild place, in which, however, coexist, together with archaeological traces and tropical fauna, singular spiritual connotations. It is in this way that, at the crossroads between nature and culture, the journey through the forest becomes a profound inner journey. The passages are marked by continuous flashbacks full of tension and surprise, where past and present, escape and search, inexorably mix, pushing the protagonist to look for answers on the border between the environment that surrounds him and his interiority. The figurative complex, here rendered with ink drawings, manages to immerse and involve the reader in the shamanic and mysterious atmosphere.
Aimed at admirers of graphic novels and comics, to discover a new authoritative protagonist.
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Illustrations by Luca Zamoc
Texts by Luca Speranzoni
Cover title Luca Barcellona
Calligraphy Lorenzo Bolzoni
Book design Bunker20,5 × 29 cm
96 pages
Paperback
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-42-2
First published October 2021
