Alfazoo

 18,00

Alfazoo 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.

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

Description

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    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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    Seven incredible drawings of the same landscape, portrayed from 1953 to 1972, and how it changes in such a short time. The debut work by Swiss artist and illustrator Jörg Müller, first published in 1973 and thanks to which the author made an international name for himself, was then something completely new in the world of picture books and is today as relevant as ever.

    No words, it is only the plates that speak and a date that marks time: where there was a meadow, a stream, a house painted with vegetable gardens and flowering trees, shortly afterwards there is also a tractor and a train passing in the background. Page after page the forest and the stream are gone, chimneys and industrial plants arrive, the painted house is demolished to make way for a busy motorway and a supermarket.

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    The edition of this book tries to be partly faithful to the first, original German edition by giving the pictures space and centrality. Dove c’era un prato (Where There Was a Meadow), which won the author the German Youth Literature Award in 1974, is today a great classic on the environment, which triggers urgent and necessary reflection.

    With a text by Giulia Mirandola, careful curator of cultural projects that focus on visual reading and the relationship with the landscape.

    Illustrations by Jörg Müller
    With a text by Giulia Mirandola
    Book design by Bunker

    30 × 23.5 cm
    24 pages
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    Why 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.

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Alfazoo

 18,00