Graphic Design History traces the social and cultural role of visual communication from prehistory to the present, connecting what designers do every day to a history of innovative graphic forms and effects. The contents of this book include the following chapters titled Early Writing: Mark-making, Notation Systems, and Scripts - Medieval Letterforms and Book Formats - Modern typography and the Creation of the Public Sphere - the Graphic Effects of Industrial Production - The Culture of Consumption - Corporate Identities and the International Style - Postmodernism in Design - Digital Design. The book includes an extensive glossary of terms, a bibliography and a list of image credits. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Drucker's historical research text traces "the chronology of the discovery of the origins and development [of the alphabet] and the concepts of alphabetical symbolism through the course of human history and tradition." Chapters include the Alphabet's Origins and its place in Classical History, Gnosticism and Hermeticism, Calligraphy and Alchemy, The Kabbalah, Renaissance, 18th Century, 19th Century, and 20th Century. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

This is a scholarly work which analyzes the artist book in several contexts including the book as idea and form, early 20th century avant-garde books, the codex, the book as a visual form, books as verbal exploration, and the book as document. The Sackner Arcvhive is mentioned in a footnote and as a major source of Johanna Druckers collected works. Drucker provides classification of artist books through headings and examples throughout this book but omits listing them in a tabular form for easy access. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

This critical text focuses on three themes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: 1) the relation of experimental typography used by the artistic avant garde to linguistic theories, 2) the divergence of experimental typography from visual images, and 3) the work of four influential practitioners of experimental typography and their debt to advertising copy, viz., Marinetti, Apollinaire, Tzara, and Zdanevich. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.