Scope and Contents

This is the second printing of the book. An essay by Dom Sylvester Houedard, Concrete Poetry (1963) is reprinted from its first publication in Typographic new series No.8, 1963. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This book served as the catalogue at the Grolier Club exhibition in New York but was published one year before the exhibition. The Sackner Archive lent two works to the exhibition.tSTEP inside design, March/April 2003 review: Lately I've been indulging in books of unusual visual richness, and for me the most exhilarating illustrated book of the season is Jessica Helfand's Reinventing the Wheel. Helfand is a designer, a scholar, and as the book shows in spades a passionate collector of ephemera. The ephemera in question here are those odd wheel charts widely used from the 1920s to 1960s for purposes as diverse as telling fortunes, managing diets, identifying birds, spotting aircraft, charting the stars, and learning French grammar (remember the Cuthbertson Verb Wheel?). Helfand's gorgeously designed book reproduces more than a hundred of these volvelles, as hey're technically known, traces their history back to early astronomy indeed to the properties of the circle itself as a...