Het boek van PTT (1938)

Item Details

no place, P.T.T. Netherlands, 1938, wrappers

1st edition, Very Good

No place, (probably P.T.T., Amsterdam) (printed by Ned. Rotogravure Mij, Leiden), 1938, (2), 49 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; Height: 9 13/16 in. (25 cm), typography and design by PIET ZWART, original wrappers., large 8vo. - Small portion of lower blank corner final leaf torn off. Wrapper. slightly foxed and creased; small rubbed spot in lower corner front wrapper.

This booklet was commissioned by and compiled in collaboration with the General Board of the Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone Services by Piet Zwart. He began work on this book in the early 1930s, but it was not published until 1938. It became a celebrated work, combining typography, illustration, and photography. It is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums.

"As Zwart had already planned in 1930, the book does indeed have two main characters: De Post (The Post Office) and J. Zelf (J. Himself). They personify the state-owned company and the young reader, respectively. (...) He creates the characters from rolled-up postcards, paper, fabric, and tin. (...) He has them balancing on a truck or on the roof of a building. He places them behind a post office counter, on a cloud cover, or lets them sink into a telephone directory. (...) Every now and then, unusually saccharine drawings appear in the book, which are not by Zwart but by his assistant Dick Elffers." (Brentjens, p.235ff)

An architect by training, Zwart began his career as a typographer designing letterhead for architect Jan Wils while both where members of the artist's association The Hague Kunstkring.  As a result of his interest in both typography and industrial design, he was hired by the Delft Cable Factory (N.K.F.) to design advertisements for the trade magazines Sterkstrrom and Tijdschrif voor Electrotechniek.  Thus began an intense collaboration between Zwart and N.K.F, as he designed hundreds of advertisements between 1923 and 1933. 

The P.T.T. catalog represents an important step forward in industrial art, being one of the first works to combine "new" typographical elements espoused by El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy and others, with close up photographic elements while also showing the influence of Russian documentary film.  The result is astounding, as a seemingly boring subject is rendered into a visual feast.

= Zwart/ Hefting; Monguzzi p.16; Maan/ Van der Ree; p.14; Broos '70, p.70; Broos '96, p.44; Broos/ Hefting p.119; Purvis, ill. between p.122 and 123; Purvis/ De Jong p.164f; Forde p.26f; Dooijes p.94f; cf. Van Faassen.