Bruno munari:
revolutions of the
water mill:
(pt. 2)

— transcript

This is part 2 of Revolutions of the Water Mill: On Bruno Munari. I’m Robin Mitchell Cranfield and I’m a book designer and a writer and illustrator. I also teach design at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. A transcript for this episode and a gallery of images are linked in the show notes, but this story is designed to be listened to.

In the last episode we looked at Munari’s childhood and his experimental early publishing projects. This episode picks up the story in 1962, looking at how the revolutionary spirit of that era influenced how Munari used publishing in his art practice. But the key year for this episode is 1972. What Munari published and exhibited that year gives us a good sense of what he got up to  in the second half of his career and so I’ve selected several projects from 1972 to showcase. By a funny coincidence, as I was finishing this up I picked up Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, his satirical, shadowy novel set in the world of Milanese publishers. I shook my head when I realized the story begins in 1972. Maybe there is something special about that year in publishing in Milan. I mean, Umberto Eco would know, right? 

This story began in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan at the turn of the 19th century. The golden trams circling the Piazza had just been electrified and Munari was born into this optimistic time and place. Let’s drop back into the Piazza del Duomo more than 50 years later, in 1962, because something strange is happening there. The Piazza’s stoplight suddenly fails to turn red or yellow or green and instead each light flashes sky blue. This creates so much pandemonium that the police pull up and cut the power. Before the power goes, the blue stoplight’s last thought is, “Poor fools! I was giving them the go ahead for the sky. If they’d only understood me, now they would all know how to fly. Maybe they were just too scared.” 

The story of the blue traffic light in the Piazza del Duomo is one of dozens of modern fables related in the Telephone Tales written by celebrated author Gianni Rodari. These are bedtime stories that Rodari claims were invented by a traveling salesman for his daughter. Each story is very short because the salesman doesn’t have much money, and long distance calls were expensive in 1962. But the salesman is very inventive and in a few hundred words each evening he can tell his daughter tall tales about ice cream palaces and an island of man made of butter simply by dropping a coin or two into a payphone. The fables are short on details and the drawings, by Bruno Munari, are very loose, almost scribbles, so the reader is left to fill in blanks left by the creators. But although the telephone tales are silly and fantastical, they do contain a lesson: how to creatively navigate an uncertain world. Rodari, sensitive to his audience of young children, uses pleasurable calamities and uncertainties, like what if an ice cream palace began melting? What would the police do? What would the children do?  What kind of cars would travel on a chocolate road? (Gingerbread ones, naturally). And what if one day a grandfather tried to relate the story of Little Yellow Riding Hood and the time she met a giraffe? He cannot finish the story because his granddaughter grows impatient — she knows Riding Hood is red — and so she runs off to buy bubblegum while the grandfather returns to his newspaper. The story remains untold, leaving us to wonder what ever happened to Little Yellow Riding Hood.

How to navigate uncertainty is important information that children need to know. But, unfortunately, not all uncertainties that we face are premised on such delightful circumstances. Families in 1962 faced a very different kind of “what if” as the cold war heated up and the cuban missile crisis brought an unthinkable fear — a hot nuclear war — into everyday people’s homes. The crisis was precipitated by America’s installation of ten missiles aimed at Russia in Italy, and although this action was top secret at the time, it illustrates how close a very frightening wolf was to the door of children’s bedrooms in Italy when the tales were published. For many people born during the cold war, this potential world-ending event was a bedtime fear. I totally remember being frightened by planes at night myself. But in 1962 it wasn’t just this fear alone that was worrying. Just as in the US, Italy was rocked by political assassinations and unrest. Financial and energy crises, inflation, environmental catastrophes, deep political polarization, terror attacks. These dispiriting episodes were drummed out by the press as the 60s turned into the 1970s and the holiday mood of the 1950s, when I left off Munari’s story last time, faded into history. 

But even before the 1960s began, Rodari and Munari had already weathered a lot: dictatorship, war, and Nazi occupation. Now that I understand his context, the cheerful, funny, and hopeful publishing projects Munari produced in the later part of his life speak to me even more, in this uncertain political era which is, as it was in Italy in the 1970s, also a pretty bad time in publishing. Munari navigated it with bravura. 

As in the first part of his story, Munari’s work between 1962 and 1972 was a mixture of more commercial design and intellectual investigations which still resonate with designers today. Rodari’s project with Munari provides us with an introduction to the new context Munari was working in during this time, with its themes of revolution, education, and public access. Munari’s creative contemporary, the great director Roberto Rosselini, wrote a letter to an American historian in 1972, explaining that the films he was making for public Italian television were designed to teach viewers about the past as well as about, quote “the contemporary age: the space adventure, student revolution, the hippies, the bewilderment in which we writhe.” Rosselini had begun making these educational films for RAI TV in 1962, the same year as Rodari and Munari’s telephone tales were first published, to great acclaim, by Einaudi. If Rosselini was looking to help viewers come to terms with student revolutionaries, Rodari and Munari were engaged in something similar, but with a bit less writhing and a bit more skipping. Both Rodari and Munari were key figures in the gentle revolution in children’s education in Italy of the 60s and 70s. A detailed account of the gentle revolution is available on Corraini’s limited podcast series Play to Learn. But as I’ve suggested by mentioning Roberto Rosselini as well, this gentle revolution in educational design and publishing for children occurred in a larger cultural and political context.

A few episodes ago I interviewed Pietro Corraini who wrote the episode on Munari’s partnership with Rodari for the Play to Learn podcast. In that discussion Corraini emphasized that Rodari’s telephone tales were intended to provoke questions rather than moralize and, in the spirit of the ‘60s, perhaps, to — quote — “give power to the children, give power to t he people reading the book and give them complete freedom.” The telephone tales were created with a Utopian strategy of imagining a world in writing before building it. But I think the way Rodari ends the telephone tales tells us something important about what kind of revolution he and Munari were engaged in, writing, “It used to be that we had no soccer balls or pots to boil macaroni in or eyeglasses for people with weak eyesight. At that time,” he wrote, “there were only human beings with strong arms to work.” In other words, look at what we did, and therefore look at what we can build, in the future, together.

Rodari’s power-to-the-people moral showcases the difference between the kind of Utopian fable that begins in the present with a “what if” premise and retellings of stories like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood which were not only commercially popular in the 19th century, but beloved of avant garde artists like the co-founders of the Victorian arts + crafts movement, William Morris and John Ruskin. Morris and Ruskin were instrumental in developing this genre of illustrated tale. They were alarmed about the effects of industrialization and modernization and resisted these developments through their art, using the book as a space to preserve tradition. 

The lushly illustrated fairy tales beloved by Victorians provided a portal to a magical, just, and highly ordered world located both in the golden mists of time and in highly detailed illustrations. These fairy tales tended to be romantic and didactic with clearly articulated morals. But, as I’ve described, for 20th century gentle revolutionaries like Rodari and Munari, fantastical tales were not a strategy to escape to the past or to prescribe model behaviour, but rather a first step in realizing, through design and planning, a more delightful future. And Rodari and Munari are actually teaching a real strategy we use in design called blue sky, which is the early phase of the design process in which a creative imagines without limits before strategizing how they will manage realities like time and money constraints to bring their wilder ideas into production and into reality. Munari appreciated children’s ability to play with ideas, their flexibility, and their curiosity and he felt these were skills to be developed, encouraged, and maintained. These are the values celebrated in all his children’s projects.

So here we have a parallel and an opposite. Like Rodari and Munari, Morris and Ruskin used the book as a place to build utopian fantasies through illustrated tales. In fact, both William Morris and Gianni Rodari both explicitly wrote fantasies about socialist utopias. But the Victorian arts and crafts movement and the Italian gentle revolution, beginning from this shared conceptual starting point, then run in opposite directions, one towards the past and one towards the future. In terms of book design and illustration we can see how Morris and Munari both used the book’s format expressively throughout their careers, with Morris using traditional medieval materials, like vellum, and hand-binding techniques and Munari testing out the potential of industrial techniques and materials, with a modern aesthetic. 

I’ll return to Morris, but let’s say for now that he was enormously influential on both avant garde and commercial publishing well after his death in 1896. And this influence extends right into the 1962–1972 period I’m looking at. At that time there was a radical utopian backlash against industry and design in Italy brewing throughout the 1960s, with groups like Archizoom coming out of Florence. This anti-design spirit would be in line with the grain of Morris’ anti- industry mode. But also at this time there was a radical break with traditional children’s publishing and the staid royal fairytale format brewing in Italy as well, which might run counter to Morris’ love of traditional tales. Independent children’s publishers like Emme Edizioni, founded in Milan in 1966 began to publish modern tales, such as a translated edition of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, whose rollicking monsters shocked readers used to traditional fairy tales

As I described in the last episode, Munari’s expressive use of book design and his use of surprising materials, were important in his publishing practice in the 1930s through to the 1950s. During that period, Munari would use materials such as tin and industrial grey paper, showing his embrace of design as a tool to bring art into the lives of everyday people. I talked about Munari’s classic children’s book, Nella Notte Buia, or In the darkness of the night, in the last episode because this 1956 book is a good example of how Munari brought his experimental approach in his art books to the public, using commercial publishing and how Munari’s decades of experience in commercial publishing had allowed him to develop what children’s literature critic Marnie Compagnaro helpfully described as a poetics of paper and ink. Munari continued to explore these paper and ink poetics throughout his life, but his 1963 book Good Design uses a completely different design strategy, showing the fork in the road that Munari took in the early 60s as he headed into the gentle revolution. 

Like most of the books I mention in these episodes, Good Design is inexpensive and still in print. I bought my copy from a little shop called Sort in Vancouver on impulse for something like $12. Good Design is a slim, square softcover book. The cover simply shows a photo of an orange, looking almost like a planet, suspended on a black background. And the orange is to scale, so the book itself isn’t  much bigger than an orange. In format, it’s very similar to a Mr. Men Book. In 32 black and white pages, Good Design lays out three very short essays. One contemplates the design of an orange and one considers the design of peas, which Munari describes as food pills of various diameters packed into an elegant case. In a third essay the book critiques cultivated roses, judging them to be banal, but allowing that the way they arrive with thorns intact does add a touch of suspense to special occasions. Good Design is whimsical but it’s also serious, like so many of Munari’s books. Munari’s celebrated Design as Art, from 1966 is essentially an expanded Good Design, being a series of short, bright, funny essays about design and systems printed in black and white. Design as Art is still widely available today in high end design goods shops around the world, often being one of the least expensive items in stock, due to its simple softcover, single colour format, the same format as a paperback novel. Arguably, it is Munari’s most important book in terms of its reach. This shift in format from expressive and experimental to inexpensive and accessible — and standardized —  is really important, I think. By the beginning of the 1970s, Munari was making frequent use of the softcover format, often dispensing with colour, too. These choices brought down the cost of printing and, as I mentioned earlier, the 1970s was financially a challenging time which was impacting book sales. So perhaps Munari was in tune with this era both culturally and commercially.

As these black and white, softcover books on design indicate, Munari was focusing more on the concepts housed in the books than in producing impressive feats of production. What caused this shift? Munari’s shift towards teaching must be a big part of it. He began to use books more as a portable container for ideas rather than as an expressive object in terms of form and he wasn’t alone in this turn towards public education among the Italian avant garde as I indicated with Rosselini’s turn to public television during this time. Like Munari, Rosselini used a less glamorous, more accessible media format  geared toward public education, conveying complex ideas using a more commercial and therefore less rarified medium. 

By the 70s Munari was writing and illustrating his own fairy tales for Einaudi in a series called Tantibambini. Munari wrote and illustrated two retellings of Little Red Riding Hood in 1972. One was Little Green Riding Hood who wears a cap of leaves and travels through the forest with frogs, snails, and crickets. The wolf in Little Green Riding Hood is foiled by a lot of energetic jumping, but Munari’s Little Yellow Riding Hood is even more inventive. Dressed in a yellow knitted cap that is — quote — “as soft as a canary’s feathers.” Little Yellow Riding Hood must deliver lemons, grapefruits, and a bottle of Garda olive oil to her grandmother. To do this, she has to pass through traffic, which, Munari writes, is dangerous, just like the woods. But, we don’t have to worry, Little Yellow Riding Hood is safe because she has hatched a secret plan with her canary friends to snarl the wolf up in a traffic jam.

Munari’s riding hood tales express his ideas about what modern children’s publishing should be as outlined in his 1966 essay children’s books which I read in full a few episodes ago. First, Munari’s tales are playful and fun, secondly they are organized creatively around a simple question that is meaningful to children  which is, how do you navigate new paths? It’s interesting that this is an important question for creatives, too. Thirdly, the riding hood books were cheap, slim soft cover books, not deluxe objects purchased to impress, and fourthly and, finally, they are set in their present . Little yellow riding hood’s father is a parking attendant and her mother works in a supermarket. Like his telephone tales partner Rodari, Munari disliked the Victorian use of  storytelling to romanticize the past or to moralize didactically to children. Like all successful creatives, Little Yellow Riding Hood knows the importance of making a plan with the right partners. She chooses to ally with canaries, the leading experts on joy. As Rodari had done, Munari doesn’t hide his moral in a spoonful of sugar. Rather, he has carefully swirled together important information with fun and fantasy. Little Yellow Riding Hood observes her situation carefully, to make smart decisions.

In his 1966 essay, Munari advises the adult wishing to give a child information to begin by inviting them to observe. “Your heart goes tick tock. Listen to it. Count the beat: one, two, three four.” he writes, demonstrating how to begin a book on time written for a child. Then he adds practical information, explaining “In a year we have spring, summer, autumn and winter. Time never stops,” Listening to the beat of your own heart, is a way of grounding yourself in your body and in the moment, which is a calming action. This is how he prepares the child for the most fearful fact of all, which is that all lives end in time. But at the end of his story about time for children — one he has invented for his essay to demonstrate his approach — he reassures the reader that as one person dies another is born, so that we are part of time and its cycles. Time is bigger than us and we're connected by that. With the cold war’s chilling effect on children’s lives, the declaration time never stops held meaning when he wrote that in 1966. 

As I mentioned, Munari’s Tantibambini books were designed to be as affordable and accessible as possible. Booksellers didn’t promote these books heavily because of their slim margin of profit. But, as Munari had written, modestly printed books with interesting information might not please the buyer who prefers deluxe editions, but children would like it a lot. And they did. The tantibambini series, including the 1972 Little Yellow Riding Hood, sold briskly for Einaudi.

I haven’t gotten into Munari’s industrial design because, I have my hands full going over a tiny portion of the books he made, but Munari designed commercially successful home furnishings, too and I’ll quickly describe two that he created in this period between The Telephone Tales and Little Yellow Riding Hood. Munari’s Abitacolo was a habitable structure with a bed at the centre of a light steel framework. This space was customizable with baskets, hooks and other accessories, so that the abitacolo can hold a basket of books or a basketball hoop or pinned up paintings. The bed can be raised up high enough for a bike to hang underneath and a desk can be affixed to the side. Abitacolo means cockpit, so in Munari’s conception, the child is literally placed in the driver’s seat of their world. The concept and the industrial material of the frame, shows that Munari hadn’t let go of his earlier Futurist ideas. The Abitacolo is an example of how Munari used educational commercial products for children to showcase his ideas about design and art which correspond to the ideas he showcases in his books for children. 

A few years before the Abitacolo, Munari designed one of his most famous pieces of industrial design, the Falklands lamp for Danese. This elegant white light fixture acts as a chandelier when suspended. Munari explains in Design as Art how he used filanca — basically cheap nylon that you’d make pantyhose from — to replace the crystals of a chandelier. Again, you can see Munari’s logic at work here: the chandelier made for the everyday person uses — and elevates — a cheap industrial material and production method to create a beautiful, flexible design. In Munari’s world, this pantyhose chandelier demonstrated the sophistication of the modern age, while the traditional crystal chandelier for him is gaudy and shabby and belongs to a mindset he describes as “The pope’s gold telephone.’ A crystal chandelier belongs to Louis the XIV, a deeply uncool relic from the past. Just google falklands lamp if you’d like to see how well Munari elevates pantyhose, or look in my shownotes gallery, and let’s just stop on this product for a moment. Nylon pantyhose ruled women's fashion for the sliver of time that offices were ruled by photocopiers, beginning in the late fifties, and beginning to taper off in the 80s. Like Photocopiers, 1972 was a boom year for pantyhose, and because Munari was in the habit of borrowing industrial materials, as with his tin book of poetry from the 1930s, or his pantyhose chandelier from the 1960s, it is natural that Xerox technology caught his attention and inspired an important publishing project.

Because another book Munari made in 1972 was Xeriografia, published on Xerox. If you listened to the last episode, you’ll recognize the Munari logic here again. Just like his useless machines and his unreadable books, Munari’s xerografie are original copies. He produced these prints by moving images while they are being scanned on a photocopier, creating patterns through light distortion that are unique to their moment of production. Since no one can imitate exactly that movement, the pattern that comes out of the machine is an original print. This was the definition of accessible self publishing, since 1972 records show more than a trillion copies made worldwide. Anyone could make an original print like this in 1972, just by dropping a coin into a Xerox machine, just like anyone could tell a fairy tale over a long distance ,as Rodari imagined, by dropping a coin into a payphone. Significantly, these were widely available shared publishing technologies, something that makes 1972 feel impossibly far away today. 

In explaining the idea behind Xeriographia, Munari wrote. “If we want to have art for everyone …we have to find some tools to make the job of an artist easier, and, at the same time, provide everyone with the skills and methods so they can all work.” (maffei 129) Following this statement, Munari raked the bourgeoisie over the coals for awhile, before announcing that he wanted to escape the idea of the genius artist who gives us all an inferiority complex. Once we feel empowered to create, in Munari’s concept,  I am paraphrasing him here, we can use our creativity fully, shaking off the humiliations that have crumpled it. In the Xerox Munari found a good example of the technological opportunities offered in this brief period, between the late 50s and early 80s, when on-demand copying was still fairly new but widely accessible and just before digital technology became the norm.  The way Munari seized on humble office technology despite his own access to fine printing services shows that he was still sprinting in the same direction he’d been going in in his depression-era youth, when he had claimed tempera and paper to be the equal of oil and canvas and created his first useless machine. 

Munari’s book of photocopies brings us to the last project in this story, one that brought him — finally!—  out of 1972 and into 1973, when he began his workshop series with the Corraini family. If you frequent art galleries, this is a series you have likely come across in the gallery shop. As with the other books I’ve profiled from this period of Munari’s publishing history these are slim, softcover books designed in one of my favourite book formats  being just a bit smaller than an A5 or 14 x 20cm size — this is about the size of half of a letter sized sheet of paper for the imperial listeners — and it is also one of the most economical sizes for shorter books. The Corraini workshop books have glossy white covers with bright, hand-rendered graphics by Munari and simple sans serif type in the upper left corner.

 In 1973 Corraini Edizioni began publishing Munari’s Workshop Series, which document and teach creative public workshops using techniques like sculpting with wire, collage, drawing, stamping, and photocopying. Books in this series include Drawing a tree, Drawing the sun — my favourite — and Roses in the Salad, a book about making vegetable stamps. Original Xerographias, published in 1977, is the book in the Corraini Workshop series that transforms that original 1972 artist book Munari created on Xerox into a more accessible book that is still circulating. Like the others in the workshop series , it’s a workshop housed in a book and it’s still available from Corraini for 10 euro or 10 dollars.  

Munari’s partnership with Corraini was very important. Corraini Edizioni took on re-publishing many of Munari’s earlier books for Einaudi, Muggiano, Pirelli, and other clients. So, you can find all of these books, nella notte buia, little yellow riding hood, and his workshop series all at Corraini.com, linked in the show notes. They carry both Italian and English editions of each. I should just add that I’m not affiliated with Corraini at all, although they agreed to speak with me for this podcast. Emme Edizioni and Einaudi are now both imprints of Mondadori, one of the largest media companies in Europe.

The next, and last, chapter in this story about Munari ought to be later than 1973. After all, he lived until 1998, producing his last book in the 90s. But to finish up I’m going to go in the other direction, all the way back to before Munari was born in Milan among its golden trams, and far from the Adige river southwest of venice where he was raised, and instead head over to Merton on the river Wandle in England in 1881 where the famed textile designer William Morris was setting up his water-mill powered wallpaper factory. I mentioned Morris at the beginning of this episode, as he and his arts + crafts associates were key figures in the establishment and popularization of the fairy tale genre that Munari drew from and rebelled against but, like Munari, Morris is also a celebrated designer of home furnishings. If you’re scanning your mind for a visual Morris’ work, just think of the lush floral prints of Liberty of London and you’ll have the picture. His books were similarly ornate, with lots of floral patterns and very little negative space.

 As designers of the home landscape, the Victorian Morris wants to cover your walls in intricate traditionally printed patterns, while Munari wants to hand you the keys to your own Abitacolo. He wants to strip your walls bare and coach you to customize them. How each of them approaches the book, then, is an extension of these larger philosophies. 

Both Morris and Munari pay careful attention to the meaning of binding techniques in their publishing design, for example. This connected split between Morris and Munari’s philosophies and approaches is central to the tradition of avant garde publishing in a commercial context and in this story, I choose the water mill is the locus around which these philosophies churn. At the beginning of Munari’s story I explained how he loved the water mill in his boyhood town, where he played with his friends. It’s where he learned to appreciate surprising discoveries and play with them, transforming items the mill churned up into toys for his friends. His relationship with that mill is key to the origin story Munari has created about himself. For Morris, his adoption of the water mill for wallpaper printing is a crowning chapter in his story. That mill represents the humane, small-scale, and traditional production environment he envisioned as an ideal mode of production. 

So, while for Munari the watermill represented the magic potential of technology and the potential it offered to his childhood playmates, one of the things Morris enjoyed about the watermill is that it kept him connected to traditional machine power, going back to 1600, and the potential it offered for workers. So Morris’s work with the mill, just like his medieval style of bookmaking, expressed his resistance to losing the past to industrialisation, and while Munari delighted in the possibility of transcending that past, when he returned to it as a man, he found that his own childhood watermill was gone. He ended an account about the machines of his childhood with this discovery, writing simply “I drove down to see if the water mill was still there, the trip was very short, the embankment was low, the water wheel was no longer.”

The water mill is a simple machine, and, like the book format, it was beloved and important to both Munari and Morris. Morris and Munari each drew energy from the watermill, it’s just that where they diverge is which direction they wanted the mill to take them in. This speaks to how differently they experienced the electrification of the world and of publishing . As I mentioned much earlier, Milan’s golden trams were electrified just after Morris’ death and just before Munari’s birth as the second industrial revolution, the technological revolution, got into full swing. By the early 1960s that technological revolution was running out of juice. The excitement about the potential of electricity, and the easy abundance of synthetic materials like nylon, began to seem outdated and an anti-industrial and anti-design sentiment surged in Italy, culminating in a 1972 exhibition at the Museum of Modern art, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape where Munari’s prototype of his bed-as-machine abitacolo was exhibited alongside younger, radical anti-design designers. Munari was just like a cork in water in 72, able to float along new currents without ever letting go of his earlier Futurist perspective. The  secret sauce Munari used in his design that kept him so relevant at that time and now, was the emphatically articulated desire he had to destroy the myth of the great artist that expressed in his xeriografia project of 1972. He was able to combine this ideal with a pragmatic ability to translate these blue sky ideas into accessible and commercially available projects. The abitacolo did go into production in 1979 and, as I described, the xeriografia artist’s book was developed into a commercially published book for Corraini that’s still in print today. Munari’s logic and his creative process was able to transcend the xerox, pantyhose, payphone, and other space age technologies that, in 1972 were already on the way out as another soft revolution, the digital revolution, got underway. 

In his book on post-print publishing, titled Post-digital print, artist Alessandro Ludovico suggests that two of the major revolutions of the 18th century were preceded by a frenzy of intellectual self-publishing. Perhaps self-publishing is, or at least represents, a revolutionary act. And Munari, who successfully worked in commercial publishing throughout his life, never gave up a self publishing practice. Even in his commercial publications he didn’t take easy roads to commercial success, making smaller, less ornate volumes like Little Yellow Riding Hood and expressive and experimental publications like La Notte Buia. 

The French Revolution referenced by Ludovico was on my mind when I was writing this, because my husband made a funny point to me when we were watching a documentary about Louis XIV recently. And he is a fan of that revolution and of revolutions in general, I think, but it just occurred to him suddenly that a revolution is a movement that brings you right back to where you started from, and whenever I hear that word now I think not only of its everyday meaning, which is a fundamental change, but also as an expression of cyclical motion. A celestial body in orbit is completing revolutions, so that each one isn’t a static or permanent change in position, but part of an ongoing cycle of change. It’s a movement measured on a larger scale of time, a dizzying way of staying in motion, or a surprising way of moving forward. What Munari teaches us is the importance of holding onto our sense of play in everyday life as a strategy for hanging onto our humanity during times of confusion and change, as we fearlessly — or fearfully — explore the potential of new technology, figuring out as we go just where we are going and what books we are bringing with us and which ones we are publishing next. Time never stops.

sources

Emilio Ambasz, Italy: the new domestic landscape achievements and problems of Italian design, New York Graphic Society, 1972

Sandra Beckett, Crossover Picture Books, Taylor & Francis, 2013

Marnie Campagnaro, “Materiality in Bruno Munari’s Book Objects: The Case of Nella notte buia and I Prelibri,” University of Padua, 2019

Claudio Cerritelli, Bruno Munari: Total Artist, Museo Ettore Fico, 2017

Alessandro Colizzi, “Bruno Munari and the invention of modern graphic design in Italy, 1928– 1945, 2011,” Leiden University

Corraini Edizioni & Istituto Italiano di Cultura Londra, “Play to Learn” podcast

Michael Cramer, “Rosselini’s History Lessons”, New Left Review 78, Nov/Dec 2012

Steven Guarnaccia, “Discover one of Bruno Munari’s masterpieces: ‘Nella notte buia’ (In the dark of the night),” Center For Italian Modern Art

Miroslava Hájek and Luca Zaffarano, Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, Silvana Editoriale, 2012

Jarlath Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 2016

Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894, Onomatopee 77, 2012

Giorgio Maffei, Munari’s Books, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008

Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou, “How the '70s Radical Design Group Shaped the New Domestic Landscape,” L’Officiel, Singapore, 2021

Bruno Munari, Design as Art, Penguin, 2019 (1966)

Bruno Munari, Maurizio Corraini and Vanni Scheiwiller, Good Design, Corraini, 1998 (1963)

Bruno Munari, Le Persone che hanno fatto grande Milano #26: Bruno Munari, Società Italiana Dolciario Alimentare Milano per Azioni, March 1983

Gianni Rodari, The Telephone Tales, Enchanted Lion Books, 2020 (1962)

Vanessa Roghi, “Per una didattica degli errori,” Feb 25, 2021

Meryle Secrest, ‘Mysterious Affair at Olivetti’, Knopf, 2019

Aldo Tanchis, Bruno Munari: Design as Art, MIT Press, 1986